Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

by Orson Scott Card

  “A world of difference. Village bullies don’t melt your face off.” He regretted saying it as soon as the words had come out. Bingwen had witnessed such things.

  Mazer sighed and leaned back against one of the few remaining trees, his voice gentle. “You can’t come because I don’t want anything to happen to you, Bingwen. And because we don’t know what’s in that valley, and because in all likelihood I won’t be able to do much damage anyway.”

  “You can do recon. You can learn things, observe things, find weaknesses, see something the airplanes haven’t. Then you can take that information back to people who matter. Right now you don’t want to go back because you feel like you’ve failed. Information is a victory, Mazer. And I can help you get it.”

  Mazer said nothing.

  “I know this enemy as well as you do. Maybe even better than you do. And I certainly know the land better than you do.”

  “There isn’t much land left.”

  “No. Nor people either.” He stared at the ground a moment, picking at a rock half buried in the earth. “My parents are in that valley, Mazer. Heaped up with everything else. Maybe Grandfather too. And Hopper and Meilin. And Zihao. And everyone I’ve ever known. My life is in that valley. You’re fighting to save your world. I’m fighting because they’ve already taken my world from me. Yes, I’m young. Yes, I’m a child. No, I’m not a trained soldier. But if I’m old enough to fight to stay alive, I’m old enough to fight the war.”

  Mazer said nothing. It amazed him that Bingwen could be so young and so frail in some ways and so old and so unbreakable in others. Children are more capable than we give them credit for, he thought. Yet even so, he knew he shouldn’t take Bingwen with him. Common sense and his training told him it was a tactical mistake. Yet what could he do? Bingwen was right. They’d find danger in the north as well.

  Mazer reached into the pack and pulled out a small bedroll. He pushed the button on the side, and the pad inflated. “You’ve been running for most of the day,” said Mazer. “Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.” He handed him the gas mask. “Put this on first.”

  “That’s for an adult.”

  “I’ll adjust the straps as far as they’ll go. It should form a seal.”

  “How am I supposed to sleep with that on? It will swallow my head.”

  “You’ll breath fine. And it will be cleaner air than what’s out here.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll manage.” He slipped the mask over Bingwen’s head and fiddled with the straps until the seal was good.

  “How do I look?” Bingwen asked, his voice muffled by the mask.

  “As alien as the Formics.”

  Bingwen smiled. “Perfect. It’ll be my disguise. We’ll use it to infiltrate. I’ll be the Formic, and you’ll be my weak human hostage. Works every time.”

  “Go to sleep, Bingwen.”

  Bingwen lay down on the bedroll. “You’ll be here when I get up, right? You’re not going to sneak off while I’m asleep?”

  “I won’t sneak off. You’d only find me anyway.”

  “You bet I would. I’d track you down.” Bingwen rolled over onto his side and pulled his legs up, getting into a comfortable sleep position.

  “How long had you been shouting my name before I found you?” Mazer asked.

  “A few hours.”

  “The Formics could have heard you, you know. You could have called them down right on top of you.”

  “I know. Especially since ‘Mazer’ in their language means ‘Here I am. Come kill me.’”

  “Not funny,” said Mazer.

  “I tried looking for you. It wasn’t working. If I had kept silent, I never would have found you. It knew it was a risk. I got lucky.”

  “Lucky is an understatement … But I’m glad you found me. Now close your eyes.”

  Bingwen did so. “I feel like I have a bucket on my head. This thing is pressing into my ear. I can’t sleep this way.”

  “Then don’t sleep on your side.”

  “I have to sleep on my side. That’s how I sleep.”

  Mazer shushed him. “If you’re talking, you’re not sleeping.”

  Bingwen fell silent. Soon, his breathing had slowed and he was asleep. Mazer leaned back against the tree, listening to the wind blow in from the south and rustle the wilted leaves overhead. The wind carried with it faint traces of a putrid smell—a smell Mazer hadn’t noticed in a while. He sniffed the air and grimaced. It was the scent of bodies rotting in the sun.

  He pulled his old shirt from his pack, ripped up the fabric, and tied a makeshift bandana over his mouth and nose. Then he took the sidearm from his hip and silently removed the clip. He took out the rounds and counted them. Then he reloaded the gun and did the math in his head, adding up the number of rounds from the other clips. About eighty rounds total. Not much at all.

  So why was he going to the lander? Why was he being so insanely stubborn? Why did he think he could face an army of Formics?

  Because of Kim, he told himself. Because he had left her so that she might have a life she deserved, and he wasn’t going to let the Formics ruin that. Because of Patu and Reinhardt and Fatani and Bingwen’s parents and Ye Ye Danwen. Because this was Bingwen’s China, not theirs.

  He settled back against the tree and recited the words of the haka his mother had taught him so long ago. A song of the Maori warrior. The dance of death.

  Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!

  Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!

  Tenei te tangata puhuru huru

  Nana nei i tiki mai, whakawhiti te ra

  A upane! ka upane!

  A upane! ka upane!

  Whiti te ra! Hi!

  I die! I die! I live! I live!

  I die! I die! I live! I live!

  This is the hairy man

  Who has caused the sun to shine again

  The Sun shines!

  Then Mazer turned his face into an ugly grimace and stuck out his tongue. Let them see the face that will strike them down. Let them see anger. Let them feel fear.

  CHAPTER 25

  Space Junk

  The rings of junk around Earth were like the rings of Saturn, only instead of ice and silicates, Victor saw thousands of discarded satellites and long-forgotten space stations and old, outmoded weapons from the time when countries were all arming in Earth orbit.

  “Look at all of this, Imala,” said Victor. “It’s just floating out here waiting for someone to scoop it up and use it. Do you have any idea what my family could have done with all this?”

  Imala piloted the shuttle toward a spot in the junk heap where several different satellites were relatively close together. “This is as near as you’ve ever been to Earth, Victor. You’ve got a breathtaking view of the planet directly in front of you, and all you see are the completely worthless, broken shiny objects.”

  Victor was floating at the artificial windshield, taking in the scene in front of him, a sea of metal and plastic and polycarbonates, all glinting in the sunlight. “I see the planet, Imala. It’s beautiful. But you have to realize, out in the K Belt, when something broke, we couldn’t simply go out and get a replacement part. We had to make one. Or pull the necessary pieces from scrap, which were rare and hard to come by. You have everything you could possibly need out here. And a lot of it is new.”

  “It’s not new, Vico. It’s crap. It’s old junk.”

  “If you think this is old, Imala, you should see the scrap we normally worked with.”

  Imala fired up the retros and started the shuttle’s deceleration. Victor was already in his spacewalk suit, a long lifeline extending from the back of it. He wore a propulsion pack and carried a laser cutter, which he would use to snip off pieces of the junk to haul back to the shuttle.

  “Some of these pieces were weapons once,” said Imala. “So don’t go cutting willy-nilly. Use the schematics I uploaded to your HUD. You’ll be able to see where it’s safe to cut and where it isn’t.” She ha
d used her LTD access back on Luna to dig through the agency’s archives and pull files on as many of the objects out here as there was still a record for.

  “Thanks,” said Victor. “I’ll try not to blow us up.”

  “That’s not even remotely funny,” said Imala.

  “Don’t worry. This isn’t explosive material. I know what I’m doing.”

  Imala moved the shuttle alongside the first of the satellites and Victor excused himself to the airlock. Once outside he got right to work. The reconnaissance shuttle needed to look like a hunk of debris, so Victor was most interested in the worthless guts of the satellites. The conduit and structural braces and insulation, all the stuff that would be exposed to space if a ship were ripped in half. All the really valuable pieces—the processors and chips and fuel cells and lenses—were typically small and therefore unimportant. Even so, Victor couldn’t pass up the temptation to cut away a few processor chips and sneak them into his chest pouch.

  He also had to keep in mind that while these were satellites, he was camouflaging a ship. He would be wise to ignore the pieces that were unique to sats, such as solar arrays or thermal blankets—all the thin membranous material that might reflect a lot of light and draw attention to the recon ship.

  At first he was slow and methodical about what he selected. But as the day wore on, and as they moved from object to object, he cut faster and thought less about what he was gathering. Quantity, not quality was what mattered now. He could be meticulous and selective in the warehouse. Out here he was reaping the wheat. Back on Luna he would make the bread.

  After twelve hours, the cargo bay was full floor to ceiling. Victor had convinced Imala to get a dumper shuttle four times as large as she thought they needed, and Victor had filled every square meter of it.

  “This is enough junk to camouflage an asteroid,” said Imala. “You’re covering a tiny two-seater, remember?”

  “We won’t be using all of this,” said Victor. “We’ll have to sift through it and find the right pieces. The ship has to look somewhat uniform, Imala. All of the pieces have to appear to have come from the same ship. It can’t be a multicolored potpourri of parts. It will look fake and slapped together.”

  “The Formics don’t know human ships well enough to tell the difference,” said Imala.

  “You don’t know that,” said Victor. “It’s a mistake to underestimate them, Imala. They may resemble ants, but they invented near-lightspeed travel. They’re far more intelligent than we are. I’m not taking any chances.”

  Imala shrugged and didn’t argue.

  The flight back to Luna was long, but Victor stayed busy the whole time. First he disassembled some of the larger junk pieces that were accessible in the cargo bay. Then he took the smaller, disassembled pieces and scanned them in the holofield, making 3-D models of each. He had already built a holographic model of the small recon ship he and Imala had purchased back on Luna. He called it up now in the holofield and began attaching the 3-D models of junk pieces to it, virtually building the camouflage design in the holofield and trying several different approaches. By the time he and Imala reached the Juke warehouse, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to attack the project.

  Lem had arranged for the engineering staff to be on hand to help unload the shuttle. So when Victor and Imala stepped out of the umbilical and onto the warehouse floor there was a small crowd of people waiting for them. An older woman of African descent with long gray braids and a slight accent greeted Victor and Imala with a smile and handshakes. “Mr. Delgado, Ms. Bootstamp. I’m Noloa Benyawe.” She gestured to the man beside her. “This is our chief engineer, Dr. Dublin.”

  Dublin’s face was kindly, and his expression softened even further when he shook Victor’s hand. “I am sorry about your family, Victor. Dr. Benyawe and I were there in the battle. Your captain and family were determined to protect Earth. They have my utmost respect.”

  Victor nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Dublin. That is very kind of you to say so.”

  “Lem wants to be certain this remains a private endeavor,” said Benyawe. “He asked that I emphasize to the staff that this is not a company project. That means we can’t help you during normal working hours. Lem’s afraid company lawyers could use that as a basis to seize whatever we do. Silly, I know, but he’s insistent. But don’t worry, I’ve spoken with everyone here, and we’re all happy to help you after hours for as long as you need us.”

  “Again, that’s very kind,” said Victor. “I’d appreciate your input.”

  “Our understanding is that you hope to place a propellant on a few of the debris objects and fly them toward the ship so that the gun doors will open.”

  “That’s correct,” said Victor. “That’s how I’m hoping to get inside. That may not be the best idea, though. If you have a better approach, I’d be thrilled to hear it. I’m making this up as I go along.”

  “We think it’s a smart tactic,” said Benyawe. “And we’ve taken the liberty of proposing a few mechanisms that might do the job, if you’d allow us to share them with you.”

  “By all means,” said Victor.

  They escorted him and Imala to a corner of the warehouse where a holotable projected a narrow cylindrical thruster two meters in length. “These are designed for quick acceleration,” said Dr. Dublin. “Each can produce quite a jolt of propulsion, so you’d want to secure them soundly to the surface of the debris. You don’t want them snapping off and zipping through space like a deflating balloon. So the anchor structure is as important as the thruster itself.” He waved his stylus through the holofield, and an unadorned cube appeared. “Let’s assume this is the hunk of debris you want to use.” He grabbed the thruster and placed four copies of it on four sides of the cube. “You can place as many of these thrusters as you like on the surface of the debris. You’ll obviously want to place them equidistant from each other or as close to equidistant as possible to evenly distribute the thrust. This will likely be a challenge since the shape of the debris chunk won’t be uniform. It will be odd shaped and unstable. You’ll also want to install the thrusters so that their orientation is the same. That way, when you reach the surface of the ship and ignite the thrusters via remote control, they will all act as one, swiveling in their anchor braces and responding to your flight commands on the remote. If you position yourself near a gun door, you can fly the chunk directly toward you, which would increase the likelihood that the gun nearest you would open.”

  “This is brilliant,” said Victor. “Let’s do this, but may I make a suggestion? Let’s not attach these thrusters to a debris chunk already floating in space around the Formic ship as I initially proposed. You’ve shown me that there are too many issues with that. What if I don’t secure the anchors well enough? What if the chunk is so unstable that the thrusters rip it apart? Plus there’s the challenge of me doing a spacewalk so close to the Formics. That would require a lot of time, and if I slip up, I might inadvertently alert the Formics of my presence before I even reach them, which for the sake of my health, I’d rather not do. So here’s what I propose: Let’s do exactly as you suggest and use these thrusters, but let’s build the chunk of debris here in the warehouse. Let’s manufacture it. That will allow us to control the structure. We can place the thrusters equidistant. We can reinforce the anchor braces. We can ensure the whole thing is fortified and won’t break apart when I initiate the thrusters. We’d control all the variables, and most important, we can test it here and be sure it flies how we want it to. That way I won’t needlessly endanger myself by trying to do all that in space. We can attach this chunk to the shuttle, then I can release it among the other debris, continue on to the Formic ship, and fly it toward me when the time is right.”

  Benyawe and Dublin exchanged glances.

  “That would be ideal, yes,” said Benyawe.

  “We can use some of the space junk we just recovered,” said Victor.

  “We certainly brought back enough of it,” said Imala.
/>   Victor smiled. “See, Imala. More is always better.”

  Back at the dump shuttle, Victor used lifters and cranes to unload all the pieces of space junk and place them on the floor of the warehouse in an organized system. Imala kept trying to help, but whenever she put something on the floor, Victor would tell her it didn’t go there and move it elsewhere.

  “If you tell me how you’re organizing it, I won’t keep putting stuff in the wrong place,” said Imala.

  “You’re not doing it wrong per se,” said Victor.

  “Well I’m obviously not doing it right either. Explain what’s in your head, Vico, and save us both some time.”

  He could see she was getting annoyed. “It’s hard to explain. I’m separating them by how we’re going to use them, either for the recon shuttle or the decoy chunk. Then I’m divvying up those pieces into categories of how ready they are for use. Some of this stuff will need disassembling, some of it will need damaging.”

  “Damaging?”

  “The ship will need to look like it’s been blasted,” said Victor. “It should be dent up and scorched and beaten.”

  “Where’s that pile?”

  They crossed the warehouse floor to a heap of junk stacked as high as they were tall. “All these big pieces here,” said Victor.

  “How do you plan on damaging them?” asked Imala.

  Victor shrugged. “Taking a hammer to them. Beating them senseless. Burning them with a blowtorch. Bending them out of shape.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Imala, crossing to a wall of tools and pulling a hammer down. “I feel like pounding something at the moment.”

  “Be sure to anchor your feet and the piece you’re pounding,” said Victor. “This is Moon gravity. You’ll likely get a lot of recoil on the hammer. And you’ll want to wear a face shield in case small pieces break off on impact.”

  She looked at him with a hint of scorn. “I know how to whack something with a hammer, Vico. I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that you were. I was just reminding you that—”