Earth Unaware (The First Formic War 1)

"They all kiss up to Pendergrass. They don't care about the work. They make constant mistakes."

"How would you know they make mistakes?"

"Because I've checked their work. It's sloppy."

"Yes, and I'm sure they greatly appreciate you, a junior assistant, combing their work for mistakes."

"Pendergrass sure isn't going to do it."

Fareed sighed. "You're done, Imala. I stuck my neck out for you when the guys upstairs were ready to put you on a shuttle back to Earth. You can at least pretend to act grateful and take this job. Who knows? In a few years, I might be able to help you get on with a private firm."

Imala wasn't sure if she should punch the wall or cry. A few years? He might help her in few years? This was his gift to her? This was him pulling a favor? She wanted to tell him no. She wanted to shut him down the same way she had rejected Ukko. But what good would that do her? The moment your work permit was tagged as terminated, you were gone. If she walked out of here without a job, she'd be shipped to Earth no questions asked. And then what? Back to Arizona to face her father and tell him how right he had been? No, she couldn't do that.

"What would I be auditing at Customs?" she asked.

"You won't be auditing. You'd be a caseworker."

"A caseworker? I'm not trained for that."

"Show them how smart and nice you are, Imala, and I'm sure they'll give you more responsibility."

He handed her a data drive.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Your first case. A free miner who came in a week ago from the Kuiper Belt on a quickship. No identification. No docking authorizations. Deal with it."

"How? I don't know what to do with this."

"You know customs law, Imala. You know the regulations. The rest is paperwork. If you smile occasionally, you might actually be good at this."

She walked out of the office, holding the data drive. She stepped into the down tube and slowly descended, feeling numb. She had come to Luna because she believed she could do something important with her life, something meaningful. Now she was relegated to resolving petty customs violations. Pendergrass was right. She had gone on the warpath and picked a fight she had no chance of winning.

She didn't bother going to her desk. There was nothing there she needed.

She paused in the lobby and connected the data drive to her wrist pad. There was a single file. A thin dossier on Victor Delgado. It didn't tell her much, other than the fact that Delgado had been asking to speak with someone in authority since he had arrived. Imala found this amusing. Sorry, Victor. You're stuck with a blacklisted former junior assistant. I'm about as far from authority as you can get.

CHAPTER 22

MOPs

Wit O'Toole sat in the passenger seat of the Air Shark attack helicopter as it flew south from the village of Pakuli in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Below him, dense lowland tropical forests began to mix with shorter, montane trees as the chopper left the river valley and moved up into the foothills. Breaks in the trees revealed small, isolated family farms with simple wooden homes built amid fields of maize or coffee. As the chopper rose in elevation, terraced rice fields came into view, clinging to the slopes of the highlands like a staircase of green climbing up the landscape. If not for the burning villages and corpses rotting in the sun, Wit might think this a paradise.

Indonesia was having two civil wars at once. The government of Sulawesi was fighting an Islamist extremist group known as the Remeseh here in the mountains, while the government of New Guinea was fighting native insurgents on that island. Civilians were stuck in the crosshairs, and the situation was getting bloody enough that the developed world was almost beginning to care. News of the burning church might be exactly the sort of human-interest story to make the media take notice. People's eyes glazed over headlines about mountain farmers murdered in Indonesia. But tell them that Islamist militants had locked a congregation of Christians in their small mountain chapel and burned the building to the ground with the people inside, and suddenly you've got news people care about.

Wit hoped that was true. The people of Indonesia needed help--more help than the MOPs could provide. And if the church incident would turn the world's eyes to the plight of Sulawesi then perhaps the people burned alive hadn't died in vain.

Wit turned to Calinga sitting in the pilot's seat. "Take vids of everything. But be discreet about it, don't let the people see that we're taking vids."

Calinga nodded. He understood.

The cameras on the helmets and suits were small enough and concealed enough that Wit wasn't too concerned about the villagers taking notice--most of them had probably never seen tech like that anyway. He was more concerned about him and Calinga getting the right kind of shots. The smoldering bodies. The blackened, charred remains of a child's toy or doll. The weeping women of the village mourning the loss of loved ones. The media was starving for that type of horror, and if Wit could give it to them, then he might be able to begin the sequence of events that might eventually result in aid for the people of Indonesia.

That effort would take months, though. The war on apathy moved much slower than real wars fought on the ground. Enough citizens and human rights groups would have to see the vids and get angry enough and complain to legislators enough that eventually someone with authority would actually take action. It wouldn't be easy. If the economy took another dive or if some politician or celebrity was caught in a sex scandal, the media would go back to ignoring Indonesia and no aid or protection would come.

Wit wasn't on a mission to turn public opinion, though. Getting the vids was a tertiary objective. His first order of business was to recover the body of one of his men who had died in the attack. Then he would deal with the Remeseh who had burned the church, either taking them into custody--which was never ideal--or taking them down--which was never pretty.

Wit saw the pillars of smoke long before they reached the village of Toro. The chapel would be little more than a smoldering heap by now, but the terrorists had set other fires, and the wind had likely blown some of the flames into the grasslands.