Earth Awakens (The First Formic War 3)

plates, Lady?" Arjuna had said.

"Wherever you can," Rena had said. "You could start with the walls between cabins."

"You want me to rip out walls? Take rooms away from my crew?"

"You'd be making one big room out of two rooms. They would still have the same amount of space."

"Yes. And zero privacy. How are my men and women to love each other if they share a room with twenty people?"

"Well, Arjuna, let's prioritize here. What's more important to you? The safety of this crew or having everyone gratify their sexual desires?"

"That is easy for you to say," he had said. "You are a woman without a husband."

"And therefore I have no desires? For a man who has three wives, Arjuna, you know next to nothing about women."

In the end Arjuna had closed himself in his room and roared in frustration so loudly that Edimar had heard him all the way back in the cargo bay. That's where she had been spending much of her days recently, holopad in hand, combing the archives of the Parallax Nexus. Now she had the answers, and she was desperate to show Rena.

She found her in the helm at the nav charts. "I need to speak with you. Immediately."

Rena followed her out into the corridor. "You look upset. What's wrong?"

"The Formic mothership. The one Victor destroyed. It wasn't a mothership at all."

"What do you mean?" said Rena. "Of course it was."

"I've been digging through the archives at Parallax. When you look outward, Ukko could have found the ship years ago. If the satellites had been programmed to identify movement like that, we would have had years to prepare."

"We wouldn't have known what it was," said Rena.

"We would've known it was extraterrestrial. We could've prepared for the worst. That would have been better than getting caught with our pants down."

"Don't use that phrase," said Rena. "It sounds vulgar. Why does this upset you?"

"Because when you look out even farther, you can see when the ship separates from something much, much bigger. This mothership that Victor destroyed, it was a scout ship, Rena. The real mothership is still out there."

Rena stared at her. "How certain are you?"

"A hundred percent. The data's irrefutable. Eight years ago the scout ship broke away from the mothership. But we saw it four years ago when the light reached us. The scout ship continued its speed at roughly half the speed of light while the mothership began to decelerate. The scout ship eventually decelerated also, but not until much later. So it reached us first. The mothership is now coming at about ten percent of the speed of light, but it is coming, Rena. I played with the data a hundred times. I tested myself. I looked at this from every angle, and I'm telling you, I know I'm right."

Rena said nothing for a long moment. "How much time do we have?"

"Five years. But that's not what scares me the most. This mothership is changing."

"Changing? How?"

"At first I thought it was breaking apart or something, but the pieces don't move like wreckage. They have order. They move like ships."

"I don't understand."

"The mothership is cannibalizing itself, Rena. It's taking itself apart to create lots and lots of smaller ships. It's transforming itself into a fleet. An army. And I think it's safe to say they're not intending to apologize. I'm glad we stopped this war. I'm glad it's over. But we have a much bigger problem coming."