Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

A upane! ka upane!

A upane! ka upane!

Whiti te ra! Hi!

I die! I die! I live! I live!

I die! I die! I live! I live!

This is the hairy man

Who has caused the sun to shine again

The Sun shines!

Then Mazer turned his face into an ugly grimace and stuck out his tongue. Let them see the face that will strike them down. Let them see anger. Let them feel fear.

CHAPTER 25

Space Junk

The rings of junk around Earth were like the rings of Saturn, only instead of ice and silicates, Victor saw thousands of discarded satellites and long-forgotten space stations and old, outmoded weapons from the time when countries were all arming in Earth orbit.

"Look at all of this, Imala," said Victor. "It's just floating out here waiting for someone to scoop it up and use it. Do you have any idea what my family could have done with all this?"

Imala piloted the shuttle toward a spot in the junk heap where several different satellites were relatively close together. "This is as near as you've ever been to Earth, Victor. You've got a breathtaking view of the planet directly in front of you, and all you see are the completely worthless, broken shiny objects."

Victor was floating at the artificial windshield, taking in the scene in front of him, a sea of metal and plastic and polycarbonates, all glinting in the sunlight. "I see the planet, Imala. It's beautiful. But you have to realize, out in the K Belt, when something broke, we couldn't simply go out and get a replacement part. We had to make one. Or pull the necessary pieces from scrap, which were rare and hard to come by. You have everything you could possibly need out here. And a lot of it is new."

"It's not new, Vico. It's crap. It's old junk."

"If you think this is old, Imala, you should see the scrap we normally worked with."

Imala fired up the retros and started the shuttle's deceleration. Victor was already in his spacewalk suit, a long lifeline extending from the back of it. He wore a propulsion pack and carried a laser cutter, which he would use to snip off pieces of the junk to haul back to the shuttle.

"Some of these pieces were weapons once," said Imala. "So don't go cutting willy-nilly. Use the schematics I uploaded to your HUD. You'll be able to see where it's safe to cut and where it isn't." She had used her LTD access back on Luna to dig through the agency's archives and pull files on as many of the objects out here as there was still a record for.

"Thanks," said Victor. "I'll try not to blow us up."

"That's not even remotely funny," said Imala.

"Don't worry. This isn't explosive material. I know what I'm doing."

Imala moved the shuttle alongside the first of the satellites and Victor excused himself to the airlock. Once outside he got right to work. The reconnaissance shuttle needed to look like a hunk of debris, so Victor was most interested in the worthless guts of the satellites. The conduit and structural braces and insulation, all the stuff that would be exposed to space if a ship were ripped in half. All the really valuable pieces--the processors and chips and fuel cells and lenses--were typically small and therefore unimportant. Even so, Victor couldn't pass up the temptation to cut away a few process

or chips and sneak them into his chest pouch.

He also had to keep in mind that while these were satellites, he was camouflaging a ship. He would be wise to ignore the pieces that were unique to sats, such as solar arrays or thermal blankets--all the thin membranous material that might reflect a lot of light and draw attention to the recon ship.

At first he was slow and methodical about what he selected. But as the day wore on, and as they moved from object to object, he cut faster and thought less about what he was gathering. Quantity, not quality was what mattered now. He could be meticulous and selective in the warehouse. Out here he was reaping the wheat. Back on Luna he would make the bread.

After twelve hours, the cargo bay was full floor to ceiling. Victor had convinced Imala to get a dumper shuttle four times as large as she thought they needed, and Victor had filled every square meter of it.

"This is enough junk to camouflage an asteroid," said Imala. "You're covering a tiny two-seater, remember?"

"We won't be using all of this," said Victor. "We'll have to sift through it and find the right pieces. The ship has to look somewhat uniform, Imala. All of the pieces have to appear to have come from the same ship. It can't be a multicolored potpourri of parts. It will look fake and slapped together."

"The Formics don't know human ships well enough to tell the difference," said Imala.