Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

"She's waiting outside."

"What about Mungwai? If you do this your career is over."

"The fate of the world trumps any concerns about my career, Victor, though I appreciate the sentiment. Don't worry about Mungwai. She can't pull our vids down, not all of them anyway. They've been copied and reposted far too many times. Two million hits may not seem like a lot on a global scale, but it means the train has left the station. You dressed yet?"

He snapped the greaves onto his shins. "How do I look?"

She turned and faced him. "Like a punk teenager. Put your hands behind you."

She pulled wrist restraints from her pocket and snapped them onto his wrists.

"I'm assuming this is part of the ruse," he said.

She took him by the arm and escorted him out into the hall. They moved straight for the exit, not rushing, but not poking along either. No one paid them any attention.

Victor stopped. "My data cube."

Imala pulled at his arm and got him moving again, keeping her voice low. "Already got it. Keep moving."

They were through the doors and outside. The domed canopy high above them was bright and blue like the skies of Earth, or at least like the skies of Earth Victor had seen in films. A car was at the curb. Imala opened the door and helped Victor inside. An Asian woman in her early twenties was waiting for them, sitting opposite, her right arm much smaller than her left. Imala crawled in next to Victor and closed the door. The car slipped onto the track and accelerated. Imala turned Victor's shoulder, reached behind him, and unfastened the restraints. "Victor, this is Yanyu. She contacted me after I left Mungwai's office. She's a grad assistant for an astrophysicist doing research for Juke Limited. She's here to help."

Yanyu leaned forward, smiling, and offered Victor her left hand, which he shook. "Nice to meet you, Victor. I recognize you from the vids."

Her English was good, but her accent was thick. "You've seen the vids?"

Yanyu smiled and nodded. "Many times. And I believe you."

Victor blinked. Another believer, and a seemingly intelligent, noncrazy one to boot. He felt like leaping across the seat and embracing her.

"I'm not the only one either," said Yanyu. "In the forums, a lot of researchers are talking about it, though most of them post anonymously so as not to damage their reputation in case the whole thing proves false."

"It's not false," said Victor.

"You don't have to convince me," said Yanyu, smiling.

"Yanyu has been studying the interference," said Imala.

"The media keeps broadcasting all kinds of theories," said Yanyu. "The prevailing one at the moment is that the interference is caused by CMEs."

Victor nodded, unsurprised. If he had to invent a theory, he'd probably go there as well. Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, were huge magnetized clouds of electrified gas, or plasma, that burst out of the sun's atmosphere and shot across the solar system at millions of miles per hour, oftentimes expanding to ten millions times their original size. They had been known to disrupt power and communication in space before, though never on this scale.

"It's not CMEs," said Victor.

"No," said Yanyu. "But the idea is right. The gamma radiation this alien ship is emitting moves much like a CME, constantly expanding as it spreads across the solar system. If I had to guess, I'd say the ship has a ramscoop drive, sucking up hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed and using the subsequent gamma radiation as a propellant, shooting it out the back to rocket the ship forward. It's brilliant engineering since the ship would have an infinite supply of fuel."

"If that's true," said Imala, "then why is the radiation coming in our direction, toward Earth? If it's propulsion, shouldn't it be emitting away from us, toward deep space?"

Yanyu smiled again. "That's just it. It's not accelerating. It's decelerating. It's desperately trying to slow down."

"It wouldn't emit the radiation from the front," said Victor. "Even to slow down. That would be suicide. It would fly right into its own destructive cloud of plasma."

"True," said Yanyu. "But the ship might emit the radiation from the sides. It would do so in equal bursts so as not to deviate it from its course, and that would explain why the interference happened so fast and spread so quickly in all directions before anyone knew what was happening."

Victor considered this. It made sense. He had known superficially that the hormiga ship was causing the radiation, yet until now he hadn't known how.

"So this ship," said Imala, "is acting like a volatile minisun rocketing toward us."

"Basically," said Yanyu.