Earth Awakens (The First Formic War)

by Orson Scott Card

  Imala said nothing.

  “They knew we were here, Imala. They knew I was inside. So they attacked the ship to destroy it and counted our corpses as a consolation prize. Then they become world heroes, and all their problems go adios. The money Lem put into this is nothing to them, Imala. They were willing to pay twice that just to dump me out in the Belt, remember?”

  “But Benyawe—”

  “Is one of them,” Victor interrupted. “They may have kept her out of the loop, but you can be sure she’s toeing the line now.”

  Imala was silent a moment. “So what do we do now?”

  “When we’re done here we go back to Luna and jettison Lem Jukes into space without a helmet. That’s what we do.”

  “What do you mean, when we’re done here. We are done here, Vico. We lost the duffel bag. It’s under a mountain of debris. And even if you could reach it, the bomb and equipment will have been crushed. You’re lucky it didn’t detonate already. We’re through here.”

  She was right. The whole plan had been in that duffel bag. Victor peeked over the lip at the wreckage. There was no sign of the bag anywhere, and Victor doubted he could separate any of the pieces that had been crushed together. Plus, if the bomb was damaged, it would be dangerous to try to recover it. Still, they couldn’t leave empty-handed.

  “I still have my helmetcam, Imala. And Earth still needs information about this ship. I’m going to the helm to gather what intel I can. If anything happens to me, you know what to do.”

  He waited for her to object, but she said nothing.

  “You’re not going to argue?” he said.

  “Why waste my breath?” said Imala. “You’re more bullheaded than I am. You’ll go regardless of what I think.”

  He smiled. “Turn off all communication equipment with Benyawe in case they attempt to reconnect with us and confirm we’re dead. Suit biometrics, ship monitoring, cut it all. We go totally black. Let them think we are dead. Then redirect all my helmetcam data somewhere else, a private cloud account, maybe. Somewhere Lem can’t access it. Because if he has it, he’ll bury it. The last thing he wants is the world knowing he tried to erase us.”

  “There are data satellites I can use,” said Imala. “I’ll program a timer and a fail-safe into the account, with instructions to forward everything to the nets if we don’t log in every twenty-four hours. That way, if something happens to us, the data doesn’t go undiscovered.”

  “Good,” said Victor. He repositioned himself and zoomed his visor binocs to a space across the room where the inner wall had fallen and pipes lay exposed. “I want to check those pipes out first. They must carry the plasma to the irises.”

  He crawled to the edge of the shaft, made sure no one was looking, aimed his body, and launched. The kick with his left foot sent a stab of pain through him, but he tried to ignore it, soaring across the room, aiming for a spot on the wall to the left of where the pipes were exposed. He twisted his body at the last moment and landed expertly, his ankle blossoming with pain.

  He crawled toward the pipes using his hand magnets. When he was within a few meters, alarms on his suit went haywire, screaming in his ears.

  Bweep. Bweep. Bweep.

  A message flashed on his HUD. WARNING. RADIATION.

  “The pipes,” he said. “They’re radioactive.”

  “Get out of there!” shouted Imala.

  Victor recoiled and launched again. He landed on the opposite wall, turned and launched a third time, this time aiming for a shaft that led toward the center of the ship. He landed near the shaft entrance and crawled inside.

  “Are you all right?” asked Imala.

  “I think so,” said Victor.

  “Do you feel light-headed at all? Nauseated?”

  “I didn’t get radiation poisoning, Imala. I wasn’t exposed long enough. I should have known they’d be radioactive. They’re funneling gamma plasma. The ship has a ramscoop drive. It collects hydrogen atoms as it flies through space and uses the subsequent gamma radiation both for fuel and as a weapon. Did you see the nozzles? Every few feet there are T-shaped nozzles on the back of the pipes that extend up to the hull and the irises. If we had a way to close off those nozzles, the plasma couldn’t fire. We’d render the ship defenseless.”

  “There are tens of thousands of irises, Vico. Thus tens of thousands of nozzles. You couldn’t close them all even if you had an army of helpers. And you can’t access most of them anyway. They’re behind the inner wall and run the length of the ship.”

  “I didn’t say it was possible, Imala. I’m making an observation.”

  Victor froze. A half dozen Formics in heavy, protective suits had just crawled out of a large shaft across the room, pushing two massive carts. The shaft was at least four times the width and height of the shaft Victor was in.

  Four of the Formics removed a large sheet of metal from one of the carts and carried it to where a portion of the inner wall had fallen away. They positioned the sheet over the exposed pipes, and the other two Formics sealed the metal plate into place.

  “A repair crew,” said Victor. “To cover the pipes. They must know when radiation leaks into the ship.”

  “You’ll need to find another way out,” said Imala. “You can’t get back to the original shaft this way without being seen.”

  “First the helm,” said Victor.

  He turned away from the cargo bay and headed up into the shaft. It was dark and narrow and littered with dung and dust. Victor blinked out a command and his suit began to create a map of his progress. He passed glow bugs and intersections and side passages. At times the shaft widened to accommodate another track, but Victor stayed true to his original course, heading toward what he hoped was the heart of the ship. He had expected to encounter more cart Formics, but he saw none. His ankle had swollen despite the cool pack and increased pressure, and the pain had settled into a dull, throbbing ache.

  Soon the path began to clutter with discarded carts, all anchored to the track in a long continuous row on the right side of the shaft, with no harnesses or Formics attached. Victor maneuvered around them, squinting into the blackness ahead of him. He had decided it was too risky to use any artificial light and had thus been relying on the glow bugs for any illumination. The bugs had thinned in number recently, however, and the way before him now was as black as space. He slid his hands along the wall, feeling his way forward.

  And then the shaft ended, opening up into a much wider but darker space. Far in the distance was a small circle of light, like the end of a long tunnel. Victor strained to see anything in the room, but he saw little definition in the blackness.

  He risked a beam of light from his glove and shined it on the walls just ahead. The room was like a circular cave lined with honeycomb, with each cell as wide as Victor’s shoulders and a meter and a half deep. All of the cells near the entrance were empty save for grime and dirt and dung. Between the rows of cells were narrow ladders that extended the length of the room toward the distant light.

  “What is this place, Vico?”

  “Not sure,” Victor said. “Food storage maybe. A hatching site.”

  “I say we turn back,” said Imala. “I don’t like surprises.”

  “This whole ship is a surprise, Imala. I say we push on and get past this as quickly as we can.”

  He maneuvered to one of the ladders and began to climb, listening for any sounds of movement ahead of him. The rungs were too narrow and close together to fit the toes of his bulky boots, but he was able to pull himself along with his hands.

  When the shaft was a distance behind him, he paused to catch his breath and turned to his immediate right, where a Formic’s face was inches from his own.

  Imala cried out and Victor recoiled, pushing off and kicking away from the ladder, shooting backward, all control lost. He crashed into the honeycomb on the opposite wall behind him, the waxy substance crushing inward on impact. His hand wrenched his gun free and brought it up, ready to fire on the attac
king creature.

  Only, no Formic came.

  He waited, finger on the trigger, heart pounding, but nothing lurched at him from the darkness. Finally he pointed his light and found the Formic across the room where he had left it, still tucked in its cell, unmoved.

  “Is it dead?” Imala asked.

  Victor looked to his right and left. Around him were other Formics, all in the same state of repose, their large black eyes staring outward. Victor reached out and scanned the nearest one with the sensors in his glove. “It has a heat signature, Imala,” he whispered. “It’s alive.” He shined his light ahead of him and saw that between him and the light at the end of the chamber were dozens of Formics tucked into their cells. “This is a sleep chamber, Imala.”

  “Get out, Vico. Now.”

  Calmly, slowly, wincing at every sound he made, Victor freed himself from the damaged honeycomb and made his way to the nearest ladder. Shards of honeycomb floated in the air around the crater he had made in the wall, and Victor saw that by some miracle, he had landed in a cluster of empty cells surrounded by sleeping Formics.

  He turned back to the ladder, feeling sick.

  He looked ahead of him and behind him, judging the distance to the nearest exit. Instinct told him to flee back to the relative safety of the shaft. That was the quickest way out and the one with the fewest Formics in his path. And yet he found himself putting one hand over the other, continuing his climb toward the unknown, moving quickly now. Imala remained silent, and for that he was grateful. He wanted to be able hear any rustling or movement, however slight, around him. He passed Formics on all sides, their faces near his own, their vacant eyes staring outward. One of them could be awake and he wouldn’t even know it, he realized. He pushed the thought away, focusing on the next rung in front of him. And the next. And the next.

  Minutes passed and then he was clear, drifting up and out of the chamber, exhaling deep, his arms tingling with exertion. Bright light was ahead of him, and he floated forward, shielding his eyes. He caught himself on a mesh netting in front of him and blinked, letting his eyes adjust. The sight before him made him almost forget the room he had just left. Beyond the netting was a lush, dense garden four times the size of the cargo bay and as wide as the middle of the ship. It was spherical in shape, and the inner wall was lined with thick jungle vegetation growing inward toward the center. The exception was a wide, circular section of wall on one side that glowed like a sun, bathing the garden in a hard white light.

  It was like nothing Victor had ever seen. Trees with massive branches twisted and reached outward, their long wispy leaves floating about them like a woman’s head of hair. Oddly shaped flowers with petals as broad as Victor’s arm span and stems as thick as his legs. Massive pillars of lichen stretched from floor to ceiling at various angles like stalactites and stalagmites that had met in the middle, thick and solid and covered with mosses. Bushes and fernlike plants with leaves that fanned out in every direction. Grasses tall and short. Ivy that twisted around tree trunks and snaked up branches and then extended their reach beyond the treetops to wrap around the pillars or trees on the opposite side, creating a latticework of green and gold that moved slightly with the currents of air, as gentle as a spider’s web.

  And creatures. The garden was crawling with insects and alien animal life. Large beetles scurried along the lichen pillars, feasting on the mosses. These were followed by crablike creatures that bit at the lichen wherever the moss had been pulled away. On the ground, two-legged animals that looked like the offspring of an ostrich and an iguana clung to roots and extended their necks, nipping at whatever fruit was nearest.

  As a boy Victor had dreamed of such places. Many times on his family’s mining ship in the Kuiper Belt, he had brought up images of the jungles of Earth and imagined himself standing beneath their thick canopies, breathing in the crisp, pure oxygen, inhaling deep their damp, green smells. Father had been a boy in Venezuela, and as a child Victor would ask him again and again to describe a rainstorm in the Amazon or the sounds and smells of a world thick with life.

  “What is this, Vico?” Imala asked. “Their food supply?”

  “It’s their life support, Imala. It’s how they generate oxygen.”

  There were holes in the garden floor in random places, each covered with mesh netting to allow oxygen to circulate throughout the ship without releasing the animals from the habitat.

  Victor watched a pair of lichen eaters chip away at one of the pillars. He was zooming in with his visor to get a better look when a Formic scurried around the pillar, seized one of the lichen eaters, and snapped its neck. Then the Formic stuffed the creature into a pouch strapped to its back and was off again, disappearing beneath the canopy.

  “Scavenger Formics,” said Victor. “They must feed off the lichen eaters.” With his visor still zoomed in he tried tracking the Formic. Instead the binocs found a cluster of Formic corpses gathered at the base of a tree, their bodies mostly decomposed and crawling with insects. “They use their dead to fertilize the plants,” said Victor. “Nothing wasted.”

  To Victor’s right and left, outside the garden, a corridor curved around the spherical habitat. “I’m going around it, Imala, see if the helm’s on the opposite side.” He pushed off and moved to his right, launching from wall to wall to move up the corridor. Once he reached the other side he quickly concealed himself. A handful of scavenger Formics were outside the garden sphere, removing dead lichen eaters from their pouches and pushing them down tubes into giant steaming vats. Pipes extended from the vats that led to a feeding station where a row of spigots were positioned. Dozens of Formics were gathered at the spigots. They each came forward in turn, drank their fill from the spigot, then moved on.

  “This is how they feed?” asked Imala. “A liquefied slurry of melted crab creatures from a community spigot? How is this an advanced species?”

  “I need to find another way around, Imala. I can’t go through here.”

  He backtracked in the corridor until he found a groove in the floor. He followed it into a narrow shaft that bypassed the feeding station. That shaft connected with a much larger one, not unlike the giant shaft he had seen empty into the cargo bay.

  The shaft ended shortly thereafter at a room as wide as the ship and shaped like a giant wheel. The center or hub of the wheel had consoles and equipment all around it, presumably for operating the spokes of the wheel, which were massive transparent tubes sixty or seventy meters high that extended all the way up to the hull of the ship on all sides. Each tube was over ten meters wide and had a troop carrier at its bottom, nose pointed upward, ready to launch. Hundreds of Formics were climbing up into the bottom of the tubes and loading into the small ships, with wand sprayers in hand and gas packs on their backs.

  “What’s happening?” asked Imala.

  “They’re sending down reinforcements,” said Victor. “They’re launching more ships and troops. They’re retaliating for the gravity attack.”

  The last of the soldier Formics climbed up into the tubes and sealed the door behind them. The Formics manning the consoles outside the tubes spun giant wheels, and the irises at the end of the tubes opened, exposing the blackness of space beyond.

  Without warning or countdown, the launch mechanism shot the troop carriers upward like the contents of a giant pneumatic tube, slinging them out into space with such speed that Victor guessed the Formics inside were feeling five or six Gs. The decking beneath Victor shook from the force, and then all was still again. The Formics at the consoles closed the launch tubes, reset the launch mechanisms, and then exited the room, leaving it unoccupied. Victor waited a few minutes to ensure no one returned and then launched down to the equipment, Imala cursing him the whole way for taking yet another risk.

  “A needed risk, Imala. “This is how they replenish their forces. If we can find a way to sabotage the tubes, then we can cut off their line of troops and supplies, we can weaken them by attrition.”

  He ca
ught himself on the consoles, eager to see the tech. But just like the Formic pod he and Father had boarded in the Kuiper Belt, the console here had no markings whatsoever. “Look at this, Imala. Nothing is labeled. There’s no language, no numbers, no symbols of any kind. No instructions whatsoever on how to operate this thing.”

  “Maybe they don’t need symbols. Maybe they know the equipment perfectly.”

  “Everything has symbols, Imala. Humans would be lost without labels on our buttons. We’d be operating blind. How do they measure anything without numbers? Speed, intake, fuel, weight, navigation. How can they be precise about what they’re doing? This is like a keyboard without letters. And look at the setup. It’s entirely mechanical. No screens, no readouts. There have to be computer elements to this, but I can’t see them.”

  He flew to one of the tubes and examined the launch mechanism. It took him over an hour to determine how it operated. Imala kept pestering him about time and his oxygen levels and the need to get moving. Finally he heeded her and moved on, taking another passageway behind the hub and launch tubes. He maneuvered through the tunnels for another half hour—doubling back at a few places and taking different routes—before he finally found the helm, positioned as he had expected in the center of the ship. Victor hid himself inside the door and recorded everything with his helmetcam.

  The helm was a compact space only big enough to accommodate eight Formic workers, all of them buckled to poles that extended from the floor or ceiling. They hovered before a series of screens showing the blackness of space from various angles. Tiny objects on the screen were drifting, and the computer tracked each one with a dot of light.

  “This must be their collision-avoidance system, Imala. This is how they track any approaching ship.”

  “If they’re tracking movement here,” said Imala, “they probably open the irises and fire the weapon from here as well.”

  Victor watched the Formics work, recording their every move. He had hoped to find a leader here, someone giving orders to the crew or, even better, commanding the troops on Earth. A general, a king, a ruler, anything. Victor no longer had the explosive device, but he still had his sidearm. If he killed the leader, the others in the helm would overwhelm him, but wasn’t that a sacrifice he should be willing to make? Wasn’t that his duty as a human being, to strike a heavy blow even if it cost him his life?