Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

Victor didn't flinch, though he realized now how foolish he was being. If they lost Ukko as an ally, or worse, if they made him an enemy, they would never get a warning out in time. "If you don't believe me," said Victor, "you can ask him when he returns to Luna. Assuming he isn't dead already."

The color drained from Ukko's face. "What are you saying? Are you threatening my son?"

"I'm not threatening anyone, Mr. Jukes. But something out there is. The same thing that has threatened every ship in the Belt and destroyed a good number of them. That's why we're here. I know what's causing the interference. And if you don't help us do something about it soon, we're all in a world of hurt."

CHAPTER 5

Mazer

Lieutenant Mazer Rackham jogged across the tarmac to where the HERC sat on the landing pad and climbed up into the copilot's seat. It was three o'clock in the morning, and cloud cover from the west off the Tasman Sea had blotted out the Moon and left all of Papakura Military Camp in near total darkness. Mazer put on his helmet and switched on his HUD while the other three members of his unit climbed into the HERC and did the same. A holo of the HERC appeared in the air in front of Mazer, covered with blinking dots. Six months ago it had taken the team ten minutes to run through the preflight sequence. Now they could do it in twenty-seven seconds flat.

Mazer blinked the appropriate commands to begin the sequence and saw that Reinhardt, the pilot, was doing the same. Avionics? Check. Load talons? Check. Gravity lens? Check.

The HERC--or heavy equipment recovery copter--was a scooper, a low-flying aircraft designed to rush into hostile territory; scoop up troops, vehicles, or supplies; and get out as quickly as possible. Since it was primarily used for extraction and not direct combat, it didn't pack a lot of heavy air support. Yet what it lacked in big guns, it made up for in armor. The standing joke on base was that a tank and a helicopter had done the funky watusi in the bushes, and the HERC had popped out nine months later.

Yet to call the HERC a mere flying tank was an insult to its design. Engineered by Juke Limited, the HERC was the world's first gravity-lensing aircraft, which used lenses to deflect gravity waves from Earth and send them around the aircraft. The lenses were not mechanical lenses like glass lenses that refracted light, but rather fields created by a center point. By adjusting the shape of the field, it adjusted the direction that gravity waves were focused or deflected. The result was the aircraft felt less gravity. It hovered. It flew without rotor blades. And because gravity lensing adjusted continuously to provide vertical placement above the Earth's surface, all that was needed to make the HERC fly forward was a means of propulsion, which the rear jet engine provided.

It took very powerful computers to constantly adjust the direction, focus, and strength of the gravlens, however. And computers, when rattled in combat, tended to fail. As a backup, in case the gravlens gave out and the aircraft dropped like a stone, Juke Limited had installed rotor blades as well. When not in use the blades folded into a single blade that tied back parallel to the main line of the aircraft like a cockroach's wings. These could deploy in 0.3 seconds, which, in high altitude, was more than enough time to keep the HERC airborne. But since the HERC was almost exclusively a low-flying aircraft, normally going no higher than twenty meters above the trees to avoid detection and enemy fire, the backup rotor blades wouldn't deploy fast enough to save the crew. If anything, they would merely lessen the impact. And even then the rotors would do as much harm as good. Once you hit the ground the torque effects from the blades would take over and flop the bird around or try to drill it into the ground. You were almost better off deploying the huge emergency chutes, keeping the rotor blades off, and praying the airbags kept you alive.

Mazer tried not to think about crashing, focusing instead on the assignment at hand. The order had come directly from the Ministry of Defence six months ago. The NZSAS--or New Zealand Special Air Services, the special forces branch of the kiwi military based out of South Auckland--was to put the HERC through rigorous field tests to determine the aircraft's combat readiness.

Mazer had been tasked as flight-team leader, and the commission had come as a surprise. He had no training as a test pilot, and he had been in the NZSAS for less than two years. As far as he could tell, there was a line of men a kilometer long who were far more qualified.

"Don't let it go to your head," Reinhardt had told him. "When the colonel gives assignments like this, it doesn't mean he likes you. It means you're expendable. You think they want their best guys dying in field tests? Hell no. They want us getting the bugs out. We're guinea pigs, Rackham. Crash-test dummies. Bottom of the totem pole."

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It was a joke of course. In the NZSAS, there were no totem poles. Every man was equal. There were chains of command, yes, but no one pulled rank or dumped unfavorable assignments on greenies. In the unit, no job was beneath any soldier. If a ditch needed digging, Colonel Napatu was as likely to grab a shovel as anyone else.

"Check and clear," said Reinhardt, finishing up the preflight sequence.

"Check and clear," Mazer repeated.

Behind the cockpit, Patu banged the butt of her rifle twice on the floor. "Let's get a move on and get this over with. I haven't slept in thirty-six hours."

Beside her, Fatani closed his eyes and laid his head against the headrest. "None of us have slept in that long, Patu. We all need our beauty sleep." Fatani was a hundred and twenty kilos of Polynesian muscle, well over two meters tall. The safety restraints around his chest were extended to maximum length, but even so the fit was tight.

"You try to get beauty sleep, Fatani?" Reinhardt asked with mock surprise. "You must suffer from some serious insomnia."

"Keep it up, Reinhardt," said Fatani. "We'll see how long you laugh when I drop your skinny butt from this bucket at three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour."

"You'd only kill yourself," said Reinhardt. "Birds tend to crash without a pilot."

"I can pilot as well as you can."

"Yeah, and by the time you crawled up here into the seat, you'd be crashing into the ground."

"Then I'd die with a smile on my face, knowing I had just dropped you."

"Enough with the testosterone," Patu said. "Can we go now, please?"

"Blue River, Blue River," Mazer said into his helmet. "This is Jackrabbit. We are clear and flight-ready, over."

"Roger that, Jackrabbit," came the voice over the radio. "You are clear to go. Mission sequence code: lima tango four zero seven foxtrot, over."

Mazer entered the code into his HUD and repeated the sequence back to the controller. Windows of data popped up as the computer accepted the code and opened the mission file. Mazer blinked the command to forward the files to everyone else. A timer in the upper right corner of his HUD began ticking up the seconds from zero. It was a timed mission, apparently.

Reinhardt initiated the gravlens, and the HERC lifted a few meters into the air. Even after all these months, the silence of the whole operation unnerved Mazer. He had done hundreds of hours in traditional helicopters, and his mind had become accustomed to the roar of the engines and the thump thump thump of rotor blades. To hear nothing but the almost imperceptible purr of the computers felt completely unnatural.