“The theory of the Hive Queen has been dismissed by CentCom,” said Li.
“You and I both know the Hive Queen is a viable, if not likely, scenario here. Someone or something engineered the grubs that are building Formic warships. Wila seems to believe that it’s the Hive Queen. And even if it isn’t, Wila understands the Formic species better than anyone.”
“Wila would argue with that statement,” said Li. “I’ve read some of her writings. She would tell you that she doesn’t understand how the Hive Queen thinks any more than you do. She was able to speculate on the purpose of the grubs only after she was made aware of their existence. She can’t speculate on what the Hive Queen will do next. No one can.”
“Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” said Bingwen. “The Fleet certainly isn’t. As far as they’re concerned, a preoccupation with the Hive Queen is a dead end. Which means any efforts they may have made in the past to understand the Hive Queen have now been abandoned. You’ve said it yourself a hundred times, Colonel. We can’t defeat an enemy we don’t understand. If that’s true, then we certainly can’t defeat an enemy that we refuse to believe even exists.”
“You’re just as capable as I am of reaching out to Juke Limited’s corporate site and requesting Wila’s contact information.”
“Which of course they won’t give me,” said Bingwen. “It might be easier if you ask your contacts. Perhaps they could assist us.”
“My contacts?” said Li.
“Whoever requested that we analyze military commanders and recover data from the Kandahar. Whoever is secretly investigating the Formics’ ability to make entire asteroids vanish into thin air. Or rather no air, since it’s space. Whoever authorized this school, which incidentally doesn’t feel much like a school at all.”
Li smiled, but there was displeasure in it. “You don’t like your school here?”
“I said it doesn’t resemble a school, sir. At least not in the traditional sense. Our only teacher is confined to his quarters. We don’t have a classroom. We aren’t allowed in the Battle Room, or Game Room, or Tunnel Room, or any other room, for that matter, other than our barracks. Colonel Dietrich is determined to obstruct us at every turn.”
“Do you think I brought you all the way out here to put you in a classroom?” said Li. “This may not be the school you envisioned, Bingwen. You may not have access to the Battle Room or the many other attractions here, but I assure you that school is in session. It began the instant we left Earth. This is a school of war. Of command. Your classroom is this solar system. From one tip to the other. This war is a much better course of study than anything I could put into a syllabus. If you haven’t realized that by now, I am deeply disappointed. Colonel Dietrich is not an obstacle to your learning. He is what you’re learning. Through his ineptitude and ego, he is teaching you what not to become. This memo from CentCom dismissing the Hive Queen, that too is a lesson in command. Your experience in the Kandahar was a lesson in command. Your study of incompetent commanders was a lesson in command. You’re either learning or you aren’t.”
Bingwen considered a moment. “You’re right. We have been learning. But we lack information and resources. A good commander assembles the right people and talent to accomplish his objectives. He gathers intelligence, and if he learns he doesn’t have what he needs, he goes to people who can help him.”
“You’re wrong, Bingwen. If you think that a commander can always turn to others to rescue him from his problems, I haven’t taught you anything. You don’t get a lifeline here. You can’t always turn to me or to Mazer or to anyone else and expect us to hand you the tools and people you need. I gave you an army. Those are your people. Those are your tools. If you want to accomplish something, I suggest you put them to work.”
Bingwen saluted. “I apologize for wasting your time, sir.” He turned and moved for the door.
“One more thing,” said Colonel Li.
Bingwen turned back.
“The data you recovered from the Kandahar was examined by my … contacts. This war will get worse before it gets better, Bingwen. The Hive Queen, or whatever it is that’s leading the Formics, is capable of far more than you or I or Wila or anyone can imagine. If I can get you clearance, you’ll learn more. Be ready for it.”
* * *
As soon as the lights in Rat Army barracks went out, signaling the start of the boys’ sleep shift, Bingwen climbed out of his sleep sack, nodded to the others, grabbed his bag of supplies, and headed for the showers.
The row of shower tubes lined one wall in the restroom, with each tube stretching from floor to ceiling so that no water escaped the tube during use. A shower in zero G was more of a sponge bath surrounded by floating globules of water, and Bingwen missed the days when he could turn on a faucet and let hot water rain down.
At the far end of the room in tube nine or ten he could hear someone whistling and operating a water vacuum. On Earth, gravity did all the work for you, pulling the water down the drain, but in zero G, there was no such luxury. You had to clean up the water when you were done. Space could be a pain sometimes.
Bingwen went to tube seven, slipped inside, and locked the door behind him. The tube would be cramped for an adult, but it was comfortable for Bingwen. He turned off his magnetic greaves, undressed, and waited.
Soon the vacuum shut off, but the whistling continued. Bingwen listened as the marine gathered his things, exited the shower tube, and left the restroom. Bingwen then opened his bag and pulled out his pressure suit and helmet. Once he was suited up and sealed tight, he turned on his oxygen, set his temperature, and drifted up to the ceiling. The metal ceiling tile had four screws. Bingwen removed them, slid the ceiling tile free, and pulled himself up into the narrow crawlspace. He tucked the screws into his pouch, pulled in his bag of supplies, then returned the ceiling tile back where it belonged, holding it in place with a few strips of suit-patch tape. The crawlspace was crowded with pipes and conduit, but it was wide enough for a small adult to maneuver through to conduct repairs, which made it plenty wide for Bingwen. The only discomfort was the cold, which didn’t bother him in his suit.
Bingwen turned on his helmet lights and blinked a command to bring up the schematics on his HUD. Jianjun had laid out his path for him, but the walls weren’t marked and Bingwen moved slower than he might have otherwise. He smiled to himself as he wiggled through an especially narrow grouping of pipes, remembering the months of training that Mazer had given him and the other boys on how best to maneuver the tunnels of an asteroid. He never imagined he’d be using those skills here.
It took him twenty minutes of moving through the labyrinth of the crawlspace until he turned a final corner and found Chati waiting for him in his pressure suit.
“What took you so long?” said Chati.
“Someone was using one of the showers. And then I went slow. Nice to see you, too.”
Their first stop was one of the supply rooms. The hard part was accessing the room from the crawlspace since the screws to the ceiling tiles were only accessible from inside the room. Chati took a small laser and cut a circle around the metal where one of the screws was housed, slicing at a forty-five-degree angle to create an inverted cone shape. He repeated the process for the other three screws, then he and Bingwen used magnets to easily lift the ceiling tile up into the crawlspace.
The supply room had rows of shelves and cabinets that stretched floor to the ceiling, and it wasn’t until they had removed the ceiling tile that they realized that their opening was half blocked by one of the cabinets.
“The schematics don’t show where the cabinets are positioned,” said Chati. “How was I supposed to know one was here?”
“Not your fault,” said Bingwen. “And maybe this works to our advantage. The cabinet will hide two of the laser cuts we made when we put the tile back.”
“I can’t squeeze through a hole that small,” said Chati. “Not with suit and gear on.”
“I can,” said Bingwen. “As s
oon as I’m down, replace the ceiling tile before we let all the cold air in.”
Bingwen wiggled into the open hole and past the cabinet, reinitiating his magnetic greaves when he reached the floor.
The cable was on a spool on a lower shelf three shelves over, wrapped in plastic and unopened. Bingwen gingerly cut the plastic, then reached inside for the end of the cable. He couldn’t find it. All he could feel were rows of cable tightly wound. He rotated the spool 180 degrees and cut the plastic a second time. He found the end of the cable easily, but it was glued onto the cable beneath it and Bingwen had to pull hard to release it.
The door to the storage room opened, and Bingwen could hear someone enter, walking in the stilted manner that magnetic greaves required. Bingwen froze. There were multiple shelving units between him and the door, but if the person walked far enough into the room, Bingwen would be visible.
The footsteps stopped. Someone coughed, tapped at a tablet. Then the footsteps started moving again, not back out the door, but down the row of shelves, toward Bingwen.
Bingwen looked to his left and right. There was an empty space on the top shelf to his left, maybe just big enough for him to squeeze into. He left the spool and silently pushed off the floor, drifting up toward the empty shelf. He gingerly caught himself on the lip of the shelf and swung his body up into the space just as a young ensign with his eyes on his tablet reached Bingwen’s row and turned into it. The ensign walked within a meter of Bingwen, who could have reached out a hand and patted the soldier on the head.
The ensign read a series of numbers on his tablet that were so close that Bingwen could almost read them himself. Then the ensign turned away from Bingwen to the shelves opposite and grabbed a small box of supplies from a lower shelf, just above the spool of cable. The ensign tucked the box under his arm and, keeping his eyes on his tablet, exited the row and left the storage room.
Bingwen allowed himself to breathe. He lowered himself to the floor and pulled the spool of cable off the shelf. He didn’t move slowly now. He pulled the plastic covering completely off the spool and hurriedly unwound forty meters of cable, which he and the boys had calculated was roughly equivalent to fifty-seven wraps of the cable from his palm to his elbow, along the length of his forearm. He then slid the spool back onto the shelf without the plastic and carried the torn plastic cover and cable back to the ceiling tile. A minute later he was in the crawlspace again, and Chati was putting the ceiling tile back into place and sealing it tight with a quick swipe of his welding rod.
“You were supposed to leave the plastic on the spool,” said Chati.
“It was too damaged. It will be less suspicious if the plastic is gone. It will look like someone came in and got cable rather than someone stole cable and tried to conceal it.”
The armory was next. They maneuvered through the crawlspace for another seventy meters, then Chati cut a hole into one of the ceiling tiles and slid in the camera feed line they had taken off Nak’s helmet.
“Coast is clear,” said Chati. “If you’re facing the armory from the entrance, we’re in the far-left corner. Equipment over here gets moved the least, if the inventory report is to be believed. We shouldn’t see anyone.”
“That’s what you said about the storage room,” said Bingwen.
“You do your job, I’ll do mine.”
Bingwen left Chati and continued through the crawlspace until he was past the armory and above a utility closet filled with cleaning supplies. He removed the ceiling tile, drifted into the closet, and changed from his pressure suit back into his jumpsuit. Then he hid his bag, initiated his greaves, and walked into the armory.
There were two quartermasters on duty near the front desk, both of them sitting at their terminals, looking bored.
“Hello, there,” said Bingwen, giving them his best smile.
The men eyed him curiously.
“This the armory?” Bingwen asked.
“And off limits to you boys,” said the bigger of the two. He had a tattoo of some kind of animal peeking out of the collar of his jumpsuit.
“Off limits how?” said Bingwen. “Like I can’t go back and see the weapons?”
Tattoo guy snorted. “Off limits like you need to turn your little Asian ass around and leave.”
Bingwen smiled and nodded as if there were a hidden meaning in the words. “My dad, Admiral Cho, he told me quartermasters had to be tough. He says soldiers are always trying to rip off the quartermaster and steal the supplies.” The two quartermasters exchanged a brief glance.
“Admiral Cho, you say?” one of them said cautiously.
“Do you know him?” said Bingwen, wide-eyed and hopeful. “He’s in the Belt on the Chandigarh. That’s the ship, not the city in India. I mean it is a city in India, but they named the ship after the city. Did you know the Fleet did that? My uncle, he’s just a vice admiral. He’s on the Seattle. That’s a city in the United States. In California, I think. Or maybe Texas, I can’t remember. Have either of you ever been to the United States?”
“You can’t be in here, kid,” tattoo guy said. “The colonel, he gave us strict instructions. He says you boys aren’t allowed in here.”
Bingwen laughed. “Yes, my father told Colonel Dietrich to be hard on us. Soft soldiers lose the day, he says. A soft soldier is a dead solider. But I told my father that he’s wrong. Unarmed soldiers lose the day. Supplies is where the victory is. He told me to find Sergeant Bird when I got here, that he would show me the new TR-19.”
The quartermasters exchanged another glance.
“Sergeant Bird works a different shift,” said tattoo. “You’ll have to come back when he’s here. And I wouldn’t get your hopes up on seeing the TR-19. That’s a powerful weapon. We don’t go around showing off stuff like that.”
“Have either of you fired one?” said Bingwen.
“I have,” said the other quartermaster. “Kicks like a cannon. Nearly tore my arm off.”
“We don’t do demonstrations or anything,” said tattoo.
“My father has a platoon of commandos that carry TR-19s into the tunnels on asteroids. The platoon is called the Grave Diggers. Have you heard of them? Their patch is the head of a Formic on a pike with blood dripping from it, which is silly because blood wouldn’t drip in space. It would just coagulate and drift away.”
“Come back when Sergeant Bird is here,” said tattoo. “You can tell him all about it.”
“Can you tell me what time his shift starts two days from now?” said Bingwen. “That will be my next opportunity, and I’d like to be here when he arrives.”
Tattoo sighed, annoyed.
“I’ll email my father soon, and I want to tell him I saw a TR-19 in the armory.”
Tattoo moved back to his terminal and tapped at the screen. Jianjun had apparently done his job because the quartermaster looked confused and tapped at the screen again.
“What’s the problem?” said the other.
“Can’t get on,” said tattoo. “Give me your machine.”
He moved to the other terminal and tapped at it as well, but nothing happened.
“System’s down,” said tattoo. “Sorry, kid. Wait. Here it is. Nope. Now it’s gone again.”
“Maybe reboot the terminal?” offered Bingwen.
They fiddled with the machines, which alternated between functioning properly and crashing suddenly. Five minutes passed before they got them working again.
“There we are,” said Bingwen. “Seems to be working now.”
“Sergeant Bird is here at 1100 two days from now,” said the other quartermaster.
“Very kind,” said Bingwen. “Thanks.”
One hour later, Bingwen and Chati were back at Rat Army barracks, taking stock of all the equipment they had taken.
“I can’t believe that actually worked,” said Nak, hefting a large capsule of NanoCloud pellets.
“This is more than enough cable,” said Jianjun. He smiled at Bingwen. “Nice work with the quartermaster
s. You realize of course that you’ll have to go there in two days and ask for Sergeant Bird.”
Bingwen had worn a microphone under his jumpsuit so Jianjun could listen in and know when to scramble the terminals.
“According to Sergeant Bird’s service record,” said Bingwen, “he’s a real hardnose. He’ll kick me out immediately and that will be the end of it. Nice work with the computers.”
“Don’t give Bingwen all the praise,” said Chati. “Distracting those dull bobs was the easy job. I had to fly around like a madman collecting everything.”
“We’ll get you a big giant medal,” said Nak.
“How long will it take you to set this up?” Bingwen asked Jianjun.
“Couple hours, maybe.”
Bingwen nodded. “Nak, how’s that list coming?”
“You’d be proud. I’ve identified the chief engineer who oversaw the creation of the NanoCloud. Noloa Benyawe. I have her email.”
“Good work. You think she’ll help us?”
“She was quoted at a tech conference recently stating that it’s foolish to abandon the theory of the Hive Queen.”
“I like her already,” said Bingwen. “Question is, will she help us immediately. Marines need answers now.”
Chati tapped Bingwen lightly on the arm. “Don’t be a downer, Bingwen. Let’s take a moment and bask in our victory. Look at all this stuff we nabbed.”
“This is hardly a victory,” said Bingwen. “This is gathering supplies. We celebrate when the marines in the tunnels have what they need to do their job.”
CHAPTER 8
Blinds
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