Fleet One, or F1, was tasked with targeting the Formic motherships positioned well below the plane of the ecliptic out in deep space. Known as Operation Deep Dive, F1 included fifty-seven different combat vessels, including thirteen asteroid-mining vessels retrofitted with IF munitions and shielding. Total combat personnel exceeded seven thousand. Among these ships were two ships equipped with ansibles.
Fleet Two (F2) was assigned to attack the Formic motherships holding a position in the opposite direction, high above the ecliptic. Known as Operation Sky Siege, the ships of Fleet Two were led by the Revenor, which carried the Polemarch, Ishmerai Averbach. The total number of vessels that left with the fleet was initially tallied at forty-two, though this proved inaccurate in what came to be known as the Battle of False Faces.
Fleet Three (F3) remained within the plane of the ecliptic to confront the Formic warships built inside the hollowed-out centers of asteroids and the many superstructures the Hive Queen built throughout the Asteroid and Kuiper Belts. These structures, many of which proved to be hollow Potemkin constructions designed to draw Fleet ships into a trap or distract them from true targets placed elsewhere, proved especially damaging to Fleet morale and resulted in high casualties.
The decision to divide the Fleet into three smaller fleets, thereby weakening the forces within the ecliptic, would prove to be grossly ill-advised. History can only speculate how many thousands of human lives might not have been lost had the commanders within the highest ranks of the International Fleet dared to consider the Hive Queen not as an ignorant insect, but rather as a master of military deception.
This failure on the part of IF leadership to consider the Hive Queen as an intellectually superior organism is yet another example of how human arrogance nearly cost us the war. Our mental advantage as a species had never once been challenged, and thus IF command was slow to acknowledge that human intelligence would ever prove lesser than that of an enemy. In truth, no human military commander, ancient or modern, has proven to be the Hive Queen’s equal in terms of creativity, craftiness, or strategic sleight of hand, with perhaps one possible and obvious exception: Andrew “Ender” Wiggin.
—Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3
* * *
Victor Delgado awoke from his most recent flight coma to discover that the International Fleet had abandoned him. It was day 217 of the flight, and after seven months of travel, Victor’s zipship, a cramped, single-passenger spacecraft, was finally approaching the rendezvous—a point in deep space high above the plane of the ecliptic, where the Vandalorum, a warship of the International Fleet, was scheduled to intercept him and nurse him back to health. The star charts projected inside Victor’s helmet, however, showed nothing but vast stretches of empty space in all directions. No IF destroyers, no warships, no support vessels, no Vandalorum.
The fleet, apparently, hadn’t bothered to show up.
“This can’t be right,” Victor said, his voice weak and raspy from lack of use. He blinked several times, trying to rouse himself further and shake the sleep drugs that still fogged his mind. “We’re only four days away from the rendezvous. We should see someone by now. Are you sure we’re in the right place? Could we have deviated? We’ve been going for seven months. If we were off by even the tiniest fraction of a degree, we could be billions of klicks off course. Please tell me we’re where we’re supposed to be. Scan again.”
“One moment,” said the zipship’s computer, using a woman’s voice that Victor found far too chipper considering the circumstances. “Scanning. Please stand by.”
Victor felt a rising sense of panic. The fleet should be out there. Dozens of ships should be blinking and registering on the scans. One-third of the entire International Fleet had come in this direction. How many ships would that be? Fifty? Seventy-five? How could the scans not detect a single one? Why was space before him an empty sea of black?
The scan would take several hours, Victor knew. And if the zipship was indeed off course, it would only deviate further in that time. Should he order the zipship to decelerate? No, decelerating now might use fuel Victor couldn’t spare. Better to wait and act once he had twice-checked the intel.
How long had he been asleep this time, he wondered. Five days? Six?
Victor tried reaching up to remove his helmet and rub his eyes, but he discovered to his surprise that his arms wouldn’t move. He remembered at once that he was submerged completely in impact goo, a thick NanoGoo-like substance that filled the cockpit and suspended Victor in the center like a piece of fruit in a gelatin mold. During moments of intense acceleration, the goo would cushion Victor’s body against the unrelenting G-forces. Victor still felt as if his stomach were dropping into his ankles every time it happened, but that level of discomfort was far less painful than enduring G-forces while strapped into a flight chair.
The downside of impact goo was that the body remained immobile, causing the muscles to atrophy. Victor’s flight suit was designed to electrically stimulate his muscles while suspended in the goo, but the suit didn’t work as well as the Fleet engineers had intended.
“Retract goo,” he said.
At once, the impact goo around him began to soften, like stiff caramel growing more viscous in a heated pan. In moments it was soft enough for Victor to slowly move his arms and legs again, a painful ordeal that Victor dreaded every time he woke from a flight coma. The first movements were always the worst. After days of immobility, his body was like a rusted, unbending machine, stiff and achy and rigid with pain. He winced as he worked his elbows and knees, his joints screaming in opposition. After several minutes the agony had lessened to a dull ache throughout his body, and the goo was as thin as water.
He moved his arm about blindly through the liquid until it brushed against a handhold. His muscles had atrophied terribly over the past seven months, and each flight coma had only worsened their condition. Some of the muscles were so thin and weak and nonresponsive that it felt wrong to classify them as muscles anymore. They had devolved into sad little lumps of pain tissue that resisted his every tweak, turn, bend, and reach.
Weak though his grip was, Victor held tight to the handhold and steadied himself. He knew no liquid could seep into his helmet or flight suit, but the fear of it happening was always there anyway. Having grown up on an asteroid mining ship, he had never experienced the sensation of being underwater. But he had seen movies where peopled drowned, and as a non-swimmer, the fear of being trapped underwater was as consuming and absolute as he imagined fear could be. He waited, uneasy, until the goo was sucked back up into the holding tubes just outside the cockpit.
“Goo retracted,” said the computer.
Victor’s body drifted freely now, anchored only by his grip on the handhold. He reached up, and with a hiss of escaping air, detached his helmet. The air in the now-pressurized cockpit smelled pungent, an unpleasant mix of body odor, soil, and dirty laundry.
Marines in the Fleet called zipships “coffin rockets.” Not only because of their oblong shape and narrow cockpit that resembled a large sarcophagus, but also because of the risk anyone took whenever they climbed inside one. Zipships were fast, efficient, and inexpensive, but they were also the most dangerous spacecraft in the Fleet, largely because they avoided typical shipping lanes and flew more isolated routes instead. That generally put them at extreme distances from any other ship, which meant no one could come to the zipship’s rescue if anything went wrong. And if there was one principle of spaceflight that Victor knew with absolute certainty, it was that something always went wrong.
Then there was the issue of comfort, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The engineers who had designed the zipship had intended for the passenger to be suspended in the impact goo for the duration of the flight. They had therefore made few accommodations for the passenger without the goo. Which left Victor to float in a cockpit without a flight seat or a reasonable place to sleep. Victor had jury-rigged a sleep-sack by stitching together a towel
and pieces of his second wardrobe. It felt like a warped version of Robinson Crusoe, except he was stuck inside a metal box instead of on a deserted island.
But that was the military. No consideration for comfort. Ships were functional, utilitarian, nothing wasted, zero frills.
Victor removed his flight suit and all the catheters that carried waste away from his body as well as the tubes that hooked into his IV port. The whole process took nearly thirty minutes, and he felt far more awake when he was done. He gripped the handhold again and floated there in his undergarments until he realized his undergarments smelled worse than the air. He stripped those off as well and stuffed them into the washing machine.
His head had cleared now. He was nearly himself.
The plan, as it had been explained to him seven months ago before launching from the Kuiper Belt, was that once he was aboard the Vandalorum, he would join its crew and continue moving upward away from the plane of the ecliptic toward a cluster of Formic motherships out in deep space. Attacking the motherships struck Victor as a suicide mission, but if the Vandalorum didn’t pick him up, taking on the Formics was the least of his concerns.
Had the zipship overshot? he wondered. Maybe he had gone too far? Maybe he had passed the rendezvous point days ago? Or weeks ago? If so, he was a dead man. He would shoot off into nothing and either asphyxiate once his oxygen depleted or starve to death, whichever came first.
“Show life-support,” he said.
He had rigged a screen on the wall and connected it to the projection feed in his helmet. Charts and numbers appeared on the screen, and Victor quickly scanned them.
As expected, he had food, water, and oxygen for only a few more weeks, which was hardly enough to get him to the closest IF depot, five to six months away. And that flight schedule was only possible if he accelerated for weeks on end, which he couldn’t do with his current fuel supply. He’d run out of fuel long before he reached the necessary velocity, and then he’d have no fuel to decelerate once he reached the destination. Which meant his only chance of survival was finding the Fleet. If the Vandalorum didn’t pick him up, this coffin rocket would literally become his coffin.
Victor felt angry then. He had suffered for seven months in a cockpit no bigger than a broom closet. All for nothing. He had left Imala in the Kuiper Belt for this. He had embraced his wife of only four months, promised to return to her, and then flown off into oblivion only to be forgotten by the military he had committed to serve. What a waste. What a meaningless, fruitless death. It was the ultimate sacrifice, and it had accomplished absolutely nothing. He never should have agreed to these ridiculous orders. He should have stayed aboard the Gagak with Imala and Mother and told the Fleet thanks but no thanks. What could they have done? Court-martialed him? Thrown him in prison? Either of those fates was better than what he faced now.
He had been told that the Polemarch had issued the orders himself and requested that Victor be a mechanic and engineer aboard the Polemarch’s ship. What Victor couldn’t figure out, though, was why. Why him? Why go to all this trouble for one man? Why spend a fortune to bring Victor halfway across the solar system to a ship he had never heard of, working with a crew he had never met? He was a mechanic. The Fleet no doubt had hundreds of mechanics, maybe thousands. And he was barely a soldier. He had a uniform, but he hadn’t gone through basic training. He didn’t even have a weapon or know how to use one. Nor was he particularly versed in military culture. He wasn’t even sure what the rank order was, except that his own rank, E1, was lowest. He was a man entirely out of his element in a uniform, and yet the Fleet had thought him so important that they had shoved him in a flying coffin and launched him to the rendezvous.
Unless this was all some cruel execution. Unless some big admirals at CentCom were all having a good laugh at his expense at the moment. But, no. He had no enemies in the Fleet, and if they had wanted to kill him, a laser through the head was much cheaper than a zipship.
“Show the asteroid files.”
A list of files appeared on the screen, and Victor felt relieved to see that everything was still in order. Nothing had been corrupted or lost. The computer drive hadn’t failed. All the intelligence he had gathered on the flight over the last seven months was still there.
The files were all observations that Victor had ordered the zipship to make as Victor soared higher and higher above the plane of the ecliptic, giving him an unobstructed view of wide swaths of the solar system. The focus of his research was the movement of asteroids outside their normal and projected orbits. The zipship had the same database that all spacecraft had, which was the orbital patterns of all known celestial objects in the solar system, basically a starmap that showed where every object was supposed to be located at any given time and in what direction and velocity it was supposed to be moving. With that data, navigational experts could chart a course through the system without fear of flying their ship directly into an asteroid.
But the scans that Victor had ordered the zipship to make showed a slightly different story. Asteroids all over the system were deviating from their projected courses. Each one of these asteroids had obviously been seized by the Formics for some military purpose. Victor had looked for patterns in the asteroid movements in an attempt to identify a larger military strategy, and he was fairly certain that he had found one. A large number of asteroids had moved out beyond the Belt and congregated together at a concentrated point, suggesting that the Formics were intending to build something enormous. And since Victor had made that discovery five months ago, whatever the Formics intended to build might already be under construction or nearing completion, which meant Victor had to get this information to the Fleet as soon as possible. The problem was, he had no means of doing so. He was moving far too fast and was at too great a distance to send or receive any laserlines. His only hope of informing the Fleet was hand delivering the data cube to whatever ship received him.
There was the possibility, of course, that the Fleet already knew about the asteroid cluster. Perhaps Fleet cartographers had seen the same pattern and alerted CentCom. But Victor doubted it. The zipship’s position high above the ecliptic gave it a vast unobstructed view of the system. Fleet observers within the plane of the ecliptic had no such advantage. Their scans were limited and filled with obstructions. They could see the trees. Victor could see the forest.
His reflection in the mirror on the wall to his left caught his eye, and Victor turned to it. He had been declining for several months now, and his appearance still horrified him. He was little more than skin and bone. How much weight had he lost? he wondered. Fifteen kilos? It was hard to tell in a weightless environment. Whatever the amount, he was a shell of what he was when Imala saw him last. Would she even recognize him now? He barely recognized himself.
Victor looked down at his hands: knobby and skinny and weak, no longer hands like his father’s—strong and callused and reliable, hands that could work tools and bend metals and take abuse as they fixed whatever was broken on the family’s asteroid-mining ship. Now they were like the hands of a frail old man. Fragile and thin.
Self-pity accomplishes nothing, he told himself. Move.
He gave himself a sponge bath and dressed in fresh clothes. Then he unlocked the garden bins, pulled out the drawers, and checked the seedlings. He had lost half of his crop a few months ago, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. A fungus perhaps. From too much water, or too little. Victor was no botanist. He had tried changing the plants’ feeding and watering schedule as he had seen Mother do before, but that seemed only to hasten the plants’ demise. They had wilted and died days later, which meant he now had fewer plants producing oxygen. Victor had immediately planted seeds to restore what was lost, but the plants were slow coming. As a precaution, he had changed his sleep and exercise schedule to decrease his oxygen intake. It was a necessary move, but minimizing his movements added to his muscle atrophy and decline.
Hello, little seedlings. I’m glad to see you coming into
the world. Too bad we’re all about to die.
He closed the plant bins and evaluated his situation. If the zipship was right where it was supposed to be, where was the Fleet? Had the Formics destroyed the Vandalorum and all the other ships participating in the operation? It was possible. Or, less severely, had the Fleet merely been delayed? Maybe they were simply behind schedule and would have sent Victor a message if they could have: Hey, Victor. Sorry to keep you waiting. We’re running behind. Be there in a jiffy. Don’t die. Love, the Fleet.
The truth was, anything could’ve happened in the seven months since the Vandalorum got its flight orders and the mission was put into motion. Maybe there was a change in command, and the new commander gave the Vandalorum a new mission entirely, one that didn’t put it anywhere near the rendezvous. Or maybe the Vandalorum was pulled into a rescue mission elsewhere. Or delayed by an unsuspected battle. Or maybe it experienced mechanical or fuel problems and was forced to turn around and abandon the operation. Or maybe the Formic motherships were no longer just sitting there in space, waiting for someone to attack them. Maybe they had moved toward the system or toward Earth, and the entire mission had changed in an instant. Maybe there was no longer a military need for the Vandalorum to come in this direction. There was Victor to recover, yes, but he would be collateral damage. The Vandalorum couldn’t abandon its new objectives and the war to travel all these months to save one person.
“Your heart rate is elevating,” said the ship’s computer.
“Because I’m considering the very real possibility that I’m screwed and will never see my wife again.”
The Hive Page 6