Mazer flipped through the exterior camera feeds and saw that the talons were a few inches away from the transport’s hull. “Affirmative. Shield’s are still up.”
“We can’t hold on forever,” said Wit.
“Then we convince them to turn off their shields. Are you still strapped in?”
“Yes, but what you are planning? I’ve had enough aerial maneuvers.”
“Last one,” said Mazer.
He shut off the forward thrusters. At once he felt the increased drag and decreased velocity. Now they were dead weight. The transport was pulling them through the air, the HERC held in place by the biting grip of the talons, like a spider clinging to the back of a sparrow. Mazer reached into the holofield and rotated the HERC’s two jet engines: one ninety degrees to the right, the other ninety degrees to the left. Now both intakes pointed inward, perpendicular to their flight direction.
“We’re going to roll. Hang on.”
Mazer tapped the throttle on the left engine, and the sideways thrust put the HERC and transport into a barrel roll, rotating them 180 degrees. Now the HERC was upside down, with the transport upside down and above them. Mazer equalized the thrust on the two engines so they exerted thrust in opposite directions and held the HERC in that position.
“Get ready,” said Mazer. “If I’m right, they’ll deactivate their shields any moment now.”
“We’re upside down!” said Wit.
“The plan’s the same. I open the hole in the floor, now the ceiling, you cut through and pop in grenades.”
“They’ll deactivate their shields because they’re upside down?” Wit shouted.
“No, they’ll deactivate because I’m taking away their gravity.”
Mazer rotated the direction of the grav lenses 180 degrees and switched it to full power. Whenever the HERC flew upright, everything above it had less gravity because it deflected the gravity waves from Earth. Now that they were inverted, he had to flip the lenses to achieve the same effect. It also meant the grav lens could once again keep them aloft.
He imagined what was happening inside the transport, with the Formics suddenly experiencing less gravity. Were they strapped down? Were they standing in the cabin? Either way, he’d give them a shake and return the favor. He tapped the two throttles back and forth, rocking the transport from side to side.
The Formics didn’t disappoint. Suddenly the HERC flew backward and then caught itself at the rear of the transport, jolting Mazer violently. For a terrifying instant he thought they had been hit with something. Then he realized that the Formics had disengaged their shields and the HERC’s talons had clung to nothing for a fraction of a second until they had pinched inward and gripped the hull.
“Shields are down!” Mazer shouted. “Opening door.”
The door in the floor of the cabin opened, filling the HERC with the roar of the wind. Mazer watched in his helmet feed as Wit moved to the hole, reached upward with the laser, and cut into the transport’s hull.
It was going to work, Mazer thought. It was a ridiculous, half-baked idea, but it was going to work.
Then he saw the Formics.
There were three of them—there in front of him, outside the windshield, clinging to the hull of their transport, flat on their stomachs, looking right at him. They wore gloves on the end of their appendages shaped like flat discs that clung to the surface of their ship. Magnets perhaps.
They scurried forward, rushing toward him, and Mazer saw that his initial assessment was wrong. Only four of their appendages clung to the transport. The other pair held a weapon, short and cylindrical like a dirty metal jar.
One of the Formics rose up and fired. A glob of thick mucus shot forth and splattered against the windshield in front of the copilot’s seat, creating a circle of goo half a meter in diameter. Inside the goo was a paper-thin, symmetrical weblike membrane—like a delicately crocheted doily.
The membrane flashed with white light, and the windshield exploded, showering Mazer with tiny shards of glass. Pain hit Mazer, hot and searing, and his HUD started flashing a warning. There were holes in his suit.
The Formics rushed forward, surging for the cockpit.
Mazer had his pistol up in his hands an instant later, firing.
The head of the lead Formic snapped back and its body went limp, still clinging to the hull. The other Formics were undeterred. They scurried forward with unnatural speed. Mazer shot one in the throat and the second in the arm. The latter kept coming, its arm half severed. Mazer put three more rounds in its chest as it tried to crawl into the cockpit, finally killing it.
But that was only the first wave.
Four more were coming, all of them scurrying down the transport with an even greater sense of urgency. One of them fired. The doily glob struck the front of the HERC beneath the windshield. Mazer didn’t see where it landed exactly, but the explosion followed an instant later, and then everything went wrong.
Alarms. Smoke. Vibrations. Spots of light twinkling in his vision. A garble of sounds swirled in his head; one moment they were a thousand miles away; a half second later they were deafening. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t make sense of any of it. It was as if the world had been thrown inside a rattle and shaken vigorously.
His vision cleared. He blinked, shook his head. His ears were ringing.
Where was he?
The HERC.
Something was wrong with the HERC. Why was he upside down?
The pistol. He needed the pistol. He looked at his hands and found them empty.
Something hit him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. It fell to the ceiling in front of him. A Formic. Heavy and hairy, its limbs tangled and scrabbling for purchase, furious, desperate, flopping around in the tight space as it tried to right itself. Mazer couldn’t breath. His chest was empty, his diaphragm flat. All the blood had rushed to his head. He sucked in air, filling his lungs.
The Formic got its footing and came at him, its maw biting at the hard plastic of his visor. Two of its hands—still in their disc-shaped gloves—pounded him, hitting him like fist-sized balls of lead. His shoulders, helmet, chest, arms. Mazer grabbed the creature’s forelimbs to try to wrestle it away, but the Formic, despite its size, was as strong as he was.
He almost didn’t notice the weapon in its secondary hands, compact and gleaming, aimed at his center mass. Mazer only had time to swat it to the side. The barrel swung wide, and when it discharged, the glob fired out the windshield, hit the transport near its nose, and exploded outward.
Mazer was thrown against his seat. The Formic slammed into him again. Everything started to spin. Outside the windshield the world flashed past like an amusement ride. Earth, sky, earth, sky. He had no sense of direction, no idea what was up and down anymore. He heard a voice. Calm and clear. A woman’s, speaking in Chinese. Pleasant but insistent. What was it? Who was she?
It was the HERC’s AI, he realized, calmly reading off a litany of system failures.
Mazer pushed the Formic’s limp body off him. A shard of shrapnel protruded from its back.
He steadied himself against the wall. His equilibrium was shot. He was going to be sick.
“Get ready,” shouted Wit.
For a moment the words meant nothing to him. Get ready? Then it came him. Wit. The hole. The grenades. His asinine, half-baked plan. They were still connected to the transport, both ships spinning and plummeting together.
“Hole is cut,” shouted Wit. “I’m punching through.”
There was a clang and then Mazer heard three deep pops in quick succession. Thoop thoop thoop.
“Cut us loose!” Wit shouted. “Fire in the hole!”
A Formic crawled over the lip of the windshield, its hind legs clinging to the HERC with its magnet discs. It looked at Mazer and raised its jar weapon. Light swirled inside it as it prepared to fire.
Mazer blinked the command, and three things happened in quick succession: the talons disengaged, the HERC shot free
as if slung from a catapult, and everyone on board was thrown violently to the side.
If they had been spinning before, they were in a vortex now. The Formic was no longer at the windshield. The world outside was a blur. They were falling. Twisting. Rolling. The dash was beeping. The numbers in his HUD from the instruments were spinning or changing or gone completely. The female AI was slowly, methodically, ticking off the reasons why they were about to die.
He had to adjust the grav lens. He had to reorient them, stop them, steady them, save them.
But he couldn’t. His head was in a blender, thrown every way imaginable as his orientation shifted, spun, flipped.
He couldn’t blink the commands. He couldn’t steady his eyes and focus on his HUD. He tried raising his hands to the holofield, but as soon as he moved his arm, the centripetal force threw it elsewhere.
It was happening again. He was killing everyone aboard.
Somewhere far away—below them, above them, Mazer couldn’t be sure—three grenades detonated, and a fireball lit up the sky then was gone, ripped from his vision as the HERC continued to spin.
Mazer tightened his grip on the stick and centered himself. Blackness was appearing at the edges of his vision. He was going to pass out. He blinked, fighting back, trying to focus.
Down, up, right, left. None of it was clear to him.
The stone, he reminded himself. I swallowed the stone.
He was tangata whenua, he told himself, person of the land, born of the earth, voice of the earth, made strong by the earth. Air, mountains, insects, all bound by mauri. Only the tangata whenua could control that energy.
Father didn’t believe it. Father cursed it all.
But Mother believed it.
And Mother was stronger.
He stopped fighting the centripetal forces. He stopped trying to right himself, to be rigid, to control it. Instead he let go. He closed his eyes. His arms went limp, his mind as well. The ringing and alarms and violent rush of air blowing through the hole where the windshield had been. All of that was somewhere else. That was a different power. A weaker one. He was the son of Papatūānuku. Mother Earth. And all that belonged to her belonged to him. Even gravity itself.
He opened his eyes. The readings on his HUD should have alarmed him. They were dropping too fast, spinning too wildly. The grav lenses were damaged, flashing SYSTEM FAILURE. He wouldn’t be able to stop the HERC with the lenses. His heart should have sunk. Despair should have settled in.
But instead he felt a great calm. A gathering of his senses. A focusing of his mind.
He had the rotor blades. If he could stop the spinning, the blades would deploy.
But how to stop the spinning? The jet engines wouldn’t help, he had no wings for lift, and engaging them might only sling them faster down to the earth.
The solution came at once. Clear and precise. A definitive course of action. And yet it wasn’t born from any previous experience or something he had read or studied on the subject. As far as he knew, it had never been attempted. And yet it was glaringly obvious.
There were emergency chutes of course, but he couldn’t deploy them all at once in a spin. They would tangle, collapse, be worthless.
But … if he deployed them one at a time, in quick succession, each at a moment when the spin was angled in such a way to allow the chute to fully extend and fill with air—even for only a moment. And if he then detached the chute, a second or two later, before the continuing rotation entangled the ropes and made it impossible for the blades to deploy—then maybe, just maybe, each chute could slow the spinning and stabilize the HERC just enough for the blades to deploy.
His hands—shaking and yet somehow steady—reached into the holofield. It was instinct now. Honed by hundreds of simulations, thousands of flight hours, and a lifetime of reading his gut.
Calmly, resolutely, as his body was slung back and forth in his harness, he waited, focusing his equilibrium to a single point in space, sensing the forces around him, seeing a pattern in the randomness of the spins. Then he felt it coming, the right twist, the right angle.
He released the first chute.
There was a pop, a violent jolt as the chute filled, and then Mazer cut it loose. They were still spinning, but slower now.
The second chute deployed, caught, and detached.
Then the third.
A jolt. Detached.
Then the sweetest sound he had ever heard. A bang, like a starter pistol, as the charges blew and the rotor blades that were folded back like cockroach wings snapped forward into place and began to sing.
CHAPTER 8
Secrets
Lem Jukes woke in a bed that was not his own with a woman’s arm draped across his chest. Slowly, gently, so as not to wake her, he lifted the arm, set it aside, and slid off the mattress, making as little sound as possible. He tiptoed out of the bedroom a moment later in his T-shirt and boxers and made his way to the kitchen where he had seen a small vid screen the night before. The screen hung beneath the kitchen cabinets. Lem turned it on, put the volume on low, and flipped through the channels until he found a news feed.
He had expected the worst. The coverage would no doubt be about the failed drone attack. Economic pundits would make lofty estimations about how much each drone was worth and how quickly Juke Limited would file for bankruptcy. They would call it the end of the Ukko Jukes era, the beginning of the company’s decline. The market would be in a tizzy. Juke stock would drop. The Board would be in a panic. It would be chaos at headquarters.
Well, Father, you dug your own grave. Now you can sleep in it.
But the drone attack wasn’t getting any coverage. Instead, a British news anchor in a tight navy suit stood in front of a giant map of southeast China like a miscast meteorologist. With stylus in hand, the anchor tapped the map, leaving blinking red dots behind. “More of the Formic reinforcements were reported to have made landfall in this area here,” he said, “gassing the cities of Hezhou, Yangshan, Liannan, and Lianshan.” There were blinking red lights everywhere. Southeast China was lit up like a Christmas tree.
The reporter tapped a spot slightly northeast of the others, faced the camera, and put on a grave expression. “Four other transports landed here in Lianzhou, where several thousand Chinese troops had encamped. Sources inform us that this was the camp of General Sima Jinping, who recently destroyed one of the Formic landers with the help of the Mobile Operations Police. The casualty estimates are in the thousands. Our satellites picked up these images. We warn our audience that what you are about to see may not be suitable for children.”
Lem’s mind was reeling. Reinforcements? He flipped through the channels to another feed and started putting the pieces together. There was mention of a secret attack on the Formic ship, but no one seemed to know what country was responsible. The investigation was ongoing. The Russians were already denying responsibility, as were the Italians, which Lem found laughable. Yes, like anyone even suspected you, Italy.
Despoina shuffled into the kitchen wearing Lem’s oxford shirt from the day before and her undergarments. Lem tensed. He was not in the mood for an awkward morning-after conversation. He focused on the screen, while cabinet doors opened behind him and pots were moved around.
A hand briefly rubbed his back. “Good morning,” she said groggily.
He turned and faced her, as he knew he must, and she stood on her tiptoes and gave him a brief kiss on the cheek. Then she turned back to the stovetop and started making breakfast. The casualness of it all bothered him, as if his being here was the most natural thing in the world, as if this was how every morning started: with him, focused on the news; and her, shuffling about, hair unkempt, half dressed, making their breakfast. Just another day in paradise. The thought made him more than a little uneasy. He had not intended things to go this far, and it worried him that she didn’t seem to exhibit the least bit of regret.
He couldn’t let that distract him, however. He went back to the news feeds, flipp
ing between three different reports, catching snippets here and there. They were calling it the second wave. There were no landers this time, and for that everyone was grateful, but there was little else to be happy about. The Formics had adopted far more aggressive tactics. And the transports that had descended in the second wave were not the only ones suddenly attacking cities. Several transports that had come in the first wave, and whose troops had been gassing uninhabited rural areas, abandoned those places to target populated areas.
It was worse than Lem had imagined. The drones had initiated a counterattack that the Chinese would pay for in blood. Father hadn’t just failed in his drone strike, he had kicked the war into overdrive; he had made everything ten times worse.
Lem suddenly felt sick. He could see it in his mind. He could picture a Chinese family, a father, mother, two young children, already fearful of the Formics, worried that their city might be next, huddled in their living room as the mother sings a reassuring song. The father gets up, parts the curtain at the window, and sees a transport alight on his lawn. A rush of Formics disembark, sprayers in hand. The father runs to his family, pushing them toward the back door, which flies open an instant later as the Formics rush in, spraying the gas that will melt the children’s faces.
A hand touched Lem’s forearm, and he recoiled.
Despoina laughed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Here.” She held up a mug capped with a lid and straw. “Do you like hot cocoa? It’s my mother’s recipe. Well actually it’s my great-great-great”—she waved a dismissive hand—“well, I don’t know many greats—my super-great-grandmother’s recipe. But everyone after her has claimed it as her own, so in that sense it’s my mother’s, too.” She held the mug closer to his face, smiling.
Lem took it and forced a smile. “Thanks.”
She stood there watching him in anticipation, waiting for him to try it.
He took a sip. It tasted like every other hot cocoa he had ever had. “Wow. That’s great.”
She brightened. “It’s the chocolate bar chunks.” She reached to her left and grabbed the wrapper off the counter. “You chop up these chocolate chunks, melt them down, and mix it in. It’s from this chocolatier in southern France. My mother buys a box and has it shipped over every Thanksgiving so she can have it in time for her Christmas parties.” She turned over the wrapper and looked at the label. “Isn’t it crazy to think that people are still chocolatiers?” She broke off one of the remaining squares of chocolate and popped it in her mouth. “I mean, how does someone even decide they want to be a chocolatier?”
Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) Page 12