Earth Awakens (The First Formic War 3)

"Just because they loosely resemble ants, Imala--and I emphasis the word 'loosely'--that hardly means they function like an ant colony. Maybe all the Formics we've seen are females. Or maybe they have seven sexes. Or just one. Who cares? What does it matter?"

"Of course it matters. It absolutely matters. If you don't understand your enemy how you can possibly hope to defeat him? What is the hierarchy here, for example? Who relegated that Formic to cart work? Who gives the orders? We're here to take out the leader if we can, and yet we have no way of identifying him or her. They don't wear uniforms, so there's no visible rank classification. How are we supposed to fulfill our objective if we haven't the foggiest idea what we're looking for?"

"The leader will be at the helm," said Victor.

"Maybe," said Imala. "We're not even sure if there is a helm. We know next to nothing."

"We know they're killing people on Earth, Imala. That's information enough for me."

She didn't argue further, but Victor knew her well enough to know she had plenty more to say.

After another ten minutes, the curvature of the floor leveled off, and the end of the tunnel came into view. Victor couldn't see much of what was beyond the shaft other than bright light, crossbeams, and a hint of the wall on the opposite side a hundred meters away. Whatever the room was, it was wide and colossal.

"Is that the helm?" Imala asked.

"Doubt it," said Victor. "I've been moving parallel to the hull toward the back of the ship, not toward the center."

His external mike was picking up noise now. At first he thought it might be mechanical--bots perhaps or machines pumping and hammering, working in unison. But the more he listened, the more he realized there was no order to the noise, no rhythm of operations, no repeated sequence of sounds that come from machines doing a task over and over again. No, this noise was too random, too scattered--like the sound of people at work--the clang of metal, the hiss of saws, the grinding and turning of heavy equipment. There were Formics in that space, he realized. And lots of them.

He inched his way forward toward the end of the shaft. The lip of the shaft was rounded, and the track ran over the lip and downward, disappearing from view. Victor reached out, grabbed the edge, and pulled himself forward just as--

Another Formic appeared, crawling up into the shaft in front of him, barreling its way inside, changing its orientation ninety degrees to enter the shaft. Victor had only a moment to push off the floor at an angle and get clear. He initiated his glove and toe magnets midflight and stuck to the opposite wall. The Formic clawed its way farther into the shaft, feet scrabbling at the divots beside the track to get purchase. The cart followed it in, metal squeaking and screaming as the anchor rod scraped against the inside of the track. Like the other Formic, this one wore blinders over its face and continued into the darkness without seeming to notice Victor was there.

Victor clung to the wall and waited until the creature was out of sight before crawling back to the lip of the shaft. The room that opened up before him was larger than any enclosed space he had ever been in, like the vast domed stadiums of Earth. It was oval in shape--like the inside of an egg--and its walls were lined with cart tracks that led to dozens of different shafts much like his own. Cart-pulling Formics were everywhere, moving along the tracks, all held in place by their harnesses and anchor rods.

The center of the room was a massive space filled with large chunks of ship wreckage. Victor's heart sank when he realized what it was. It was the Italians all over again. A nightmare revisited. Cabins, engines, helms, cockpits, fuselages, fuel tanks. All twisted and broken and ripped apart.

Imala sounded nervous. "What is that, Vico?"

"It's wreckage, Imala. It's the debris of destroyed human ships."

She was quiet a moment. "How is that even possible?"

Victor turned to the left and saw a massive aperture on the wall, currently closed. "They must have brought the big pieces in from outside through that aperture."

"Yes, but where did the debris come from? How could they recover it? Is this from the ships that attacked them here in orbit? The cannons destroyed those ships. They obliterated them. The pieces exploded and flew off into space."

"Well, they obviously recovered some of the pieces, Imala. Look at that chunk of hull plating there? It has the American flag on the side. That's from the American fleet." He zoomed in with his visor to show her. The flag was scorched and the metal was twisted, but there was no denying the red and white stripes and blue box of stars.

"Not all of these are military vessels, though," said Victor. "Look. See those pieces there?" He zoomed in on another hunk of debris. "That's free-miner design. That's from a digger, Imala. That's a clan ship."

"I don't understand," said Imala. "Free miners haven't attacked the Formics."

"Not here they haven't. Not in near-Earth orbit."

"What are you saying? That some of these ships are from the Belt?"

"And the Kuiper Belt," said Victor. "They have to be."

"That's not possible, Vico. The Formics were coming in hot. They were decelerating the whole time, but they were never slow enough to recover anything."

"They didn't have to, Imala. The pieces followed them in. Remember the vids Lem showed us of the Battle of the Belt? When the Formics destroyed some of the ships, several pieces of the wreckage got caught in a magnetic field behind the ship. The field wasn't strong enough to seize the pieces and pull them behind the ship like the tail of a comet, but the field was strong enough to influence the trajectory of the wreckage and put it on the same course as the Formic ship."

"So this wreckage followed the Formics to Earth? They've been dragging debris across the entire system?"

Victor didn't answer. The full implication of what he was saying had just taken root in his mind. "What if a piece of El Cavador is here, Imala? What if part of my family's ship got caught in that field and pulled to Earth? Or worse, what if someone from El Cavador is here?"

It was unlikely, he knew, but he couldn't deny the possibility. Lem had said that during the battle in the Kuiper Belt the Formics had flung the men of El Cavador away from the Formic ship and out into space. That wouldn't put them behind the ship and anywhere near the magnetic field, but what if the Formics had thrown at least one person in that direction? And what if that one person had been Father?