Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

"Where's it going?" said Fatani.

"Don't know," said Mazer. "Keep on eye on the aircraft in case another one comes out."

He stepped toward the alien walking away from them, his gun still up, following it. The creature was moving slow. It couldn't go far. Mazer knew he needed to kill it. But what then? Should they try to recover the body? Surely China would want to study it. And if not the alien then at least whatever the alien was carrying in its container.

The creature reached behind it with its good, smaller hand and found the tube from the canister. It passed the tube up to its larger hand. The two hands worked in tandem, sliding down the tube until they found the wand, which the creature grabbed and pointed at the grass in front of it. A yellow mist emanated. The grass immediately wilted and turned black, dying.

Alarms started going off in Mazer's helmet. A biohazard alert.

"Masks!" shouted Mazer, retreating a few steps. He blinked the command, and the oxygen mask inside his helmet pressed against his face, covering his mouth and nose. He felt the suction of it and knew the seal was tight. Fresh oxygen poured in.

"Back off," he said. "It's spraying some kind of defoliant."

"It's in the air," said Fatani. "My helmet's going berserk."

The creature continued spraying. Wide swaths of grass around it died. The mist swirled and grew, carried away from them by the wind.

"We've got to do something," said Patu.

Mazer hesitated a moment longer then pulled the trigger. His gun discharged. The creature took the round to the head and dropped. The wand stopped spraying.

"It's the defoliant," said Mazer. "There are traces of it in the air. Get back to the HERC. Reinhardt, move the HERC upwind."

The HERC lifted slightly into the air and moved thirty meters north before it set down again.

"What if that thing isn't dead?" said Fatani.

"I got it," said Mazer. "Get back inside. Touch nothing. Don't sit down. Whatever it was spraying may be on your clothes."

They moved. Mazer blinked a command and turned on the thermal imaging. The creature on the ground showed a slight heat signature. Faint but it was clearly warm-blooded. Mazer squeezed off four more rounds, just to be sure. The creature took each in the back, jerking slightly as if kicked. Otherwise it didn't move. The head wound was bleeding out in the grass.

Mazer turned to the alien aircraft and climbed up on top of it. He stood at the edge of the door and looked down inside. At the bottom, clumped together in a heap was a mass of alien bodies, all of them armed with the same defoliant canisters on their backs. "It's a troop carrier. It's hard to get an exact count of how many creatures are in here. The bodies are all clumped together. I'm going to guess nine."

Mazer did the math in his head. He wasn't sure how many troop carriers had come out of the lander, but it had to have been at least a hundred and maybe double that. If each of them were filled with ten troops armed with defoliants, the casualty count to the Chinese could be enormous, to say nothing of the ecological implications.

One of the aliens moved, still alive. Mazer emptied his gun into it.

The pile went still.

He knelt down, took out his laser cutter, and began slicing away at a corner of the troop carrier, trying to cut a piece of the metal off for analysis. The laser, which normally sliced through steel with ease, cut slowly, having a hard time with the metal. Mazer had hoped for a larger piece, but the pace of the cut prompted him to settle for a tiny piece no bigger than a coin. He blew on it, letting the metal cool, then dropped it into a small container at his hip. Then he stepped off the door and tried to push it forward back into place, hoping to seal the aircraft closed and thus lock the chemical inside. The door didn't move. He briefly looked inside for a lever or switch or button but saw none.

He lowered himself from the troop carrier and ran for the HERC.

He stepped up onto the landing skid and grabbed a handhold. "Take us up," he told Reinhardt. "Directly over the dead grass."

The HERC rose.

With his free hand, Mazer dug under the dash until he found the flare gun. There were several signal flares attached to its base. He would have preferred another method, a more reliable incendiary that was easier to control--flares were so unpredictable--but it was all he had and he didn't want to get any closer to the dead grass. He loaded a flare and fired it straight down into the black patch of grass. The flare bounced once and ricocheted off to the side, landing a distance away, spinning like a firework in a patch of perfectly healthy grass, spewing sparks and flame.

Mazer loaded another flare and tried again. This time the flare hit the ground and spun wildly in place, spewing sparks in every direction before it shot off elsewhere. It wasn't as accurate as Mazer had hoped, but it was enough; the dead grass caught the flames and began to burn.

Mazer turned to Reinhardt. "Find us a flat surface nearby, preferably away from vegetation. A road maybe. Fast."

The HERC banked east. Mazer scanned the skies. The troop carriers and smaller aircraft were elsewhere, moving away from them.

Reinhardt brought the HERC down onto a dirt road, the first one Mazer had seen in a while.

Mazer hopped out, removed his helmet, and set it on the ground. "Patu and Fatani, we need to strip down. Whatever was exposed to the air, whatever may have come in contact with the defoliant, starting with your fatigues. Dump them here in a pile. Don't let your clothes touch another part of your skin or anything inside the HERC, if it can be avoided. Keep your boots."