"Did you see any other holes?"
"No, but it can't be the only one. There are hundreds of workers down there. If they sleep in the lander, that one hole would bottleneck at the beginning and end of every shift. There have to be others."
Mazer scanned for several minutes. "I've counted three other sets of holes, all of them like the set you found. One hole outside the shield, one inside."
"And those are just the ones we can see from here," said Bingwen. "There are probably dozens of these holes all around the lander. This is it. This is the answer. We have to tell the army. They can send in soldiers through the holes to take the lander."
"No," said Mazer. "We're not going in through the holes. The holes aren't the answer."
"But..." Bingwen's voice broke off suddenly, and Mazer saw a look of horror on the boy's face. He was staring at something over Mazer's head, behind him. Mazer spun onto his back and saw that a troop transport had landed on the hilltop. Formics poured out of it, running in their direction, riflelike weapons in their top sets of arms.
Mazer was on his feet in an instant, lifting Bingwen and pushing him back the way they had come. "Run!"
Bingwen ran.
Mazer rushed forward, dropped to one knee, his gun in his hand, the wrist brace snapping into place with a click-click-click. The Formics were sprinting toward him, thirty meters away. Mazer fired a dozen shots, and five Formics dropped. Seven more kept coming. Mazer turned and was on his feet again, sprinting. He scooped up the pack as he ran past it, throwing it over one shoulder, then another. He dropped the clip from the gun and snapped in the second magazine. He fired a four-round burst behind him as he ran. Another Formic fell.
Bingwen was ahead of him, running along the ridge of the hill as fast as his legs would carry him, which wasn't nearly fast enough. Mazer caught up to him almost immediately. To their left was the lander and hundreds of Formics. To their right was the steep muddy slope they had so painstakingly ascended. There was only one thing to do, Mazer realized. They had no cover up here, nowhere to dig in and fight. They couldn't make a stand. They were completely exposed.
Mazer scooped up Bingwen into his arms. "Hold on tight!"
Bingwen wrapped his arms around Mazer's neck and buried his face into Mazer's shoulder. No hesitation. Immediate obedience.
Then Mazer cut hard to the right where an outcrop of rock extended beyond the edge of the hill.
He ran to the end of it at a full sprint.
And jumped out into space.
The hill was steep, and Mazer and Bingwen dropped ten meters before hitting the slope and shooting down the mud on Mazer's back, using the pack like a luge sled. The ground gave way all around them, sliding off the slope like a sheet pulled from a bed. Mazer could feel the mud gathering around them like a wave, threatening to consume them, swallow them, bury them alive. Mazer kept his legs stiff out in front of him, toes pointed, clinging to Bingwen, trying to maintain as much speed as possible.
They would have to hit the ground running, he knew. They couldn't be caught at the base of the hill on Mazer's back. The mud behind them would cover them in an instant.
They were nearing the bottom. Mud and grit and dirt sprayed up into Mazer's face, making it hard to see. He would have to time this right; come up too soon and his feet would sink into the muck at the bottom of the hill. Pop up too late, and he would be too prostrate on the ground with the weight of Bingwen on top of him, unable to climb to his feet in time.
He pointed his right foot forward, then dug his heel hard into the earth at what he hoped was the right moment. In the same instant he threw his upper body forward, harder than he thought was necessary since Bingwen was in his arms.
It worked. He popped up from his semirecumbent position into a somewhat standing position, falling the last meter or so to the level earth. He was on flat ground, but his forward momentum was more than he had anticipated. He stumbled. Bingwen fell from his arms, down to one knee. The mud was sliding all around them like beached surf, and Mazer could hear the rumble of more mud behind them. He high-stepped, lifting his feet up hard with each step, not allowing them to become swallowed up in the pool of mud at his feet. His hand reached down and grabbed the front of Bingwen's shirt, lifting him up again. They stumbled, fell, rose up again, running forward, moving, surging a microsecond ahead of the wave.
And then they were free of it, running on level, hard-packed dirt, Mazer's feet steady and sure-footed beneath him.
A valley of scorched earth stretched out in front of them. There was no cover here either. No trees. No ditches. No holes to climb into. They were completely in the open, standing out in the full bright of day like two brown dots on a vast black canvas.
Mazer never stopped running, his heart hammering in his chest, Bingwen clinging to him tightly.
The troop transport dropped out of the sky twenty meters in front of them. Four Formics jumped out before Mazer had even changed directions or slowed down. The sidearm was still strapped to his wrist--he would have lost it otherwise. He raised it and fired, the shot going wide. It was nearly impossible to carry Bingwen and run in one direction and shoot in another and hope to hit anything.
They couldn't keep running. The transport could easily follow them wherever they went. They had to take out the crew. Mazer stopped dead and dropped Bingwen from his arms. "Get behind me!" Mazer spun and lowered himself to one knee again, preparing to take aim, when the net slammed into him, knocking him back onto Bingwen.
A surge of paralyzing electricity shot thro
ugh Mazer's body, constricting all of his muscles at once. The heavy fibrous net had him pinned down on his back, with Bingwen beneath him, the net crackling and hissing and pulsing with energy. Mazer couldn't move. His body felt as if it were burning up from the inside. His face was contorted in a painful rictus, his jaw clenched shut, his fingers bent and frozen in awkward positions as the energy surged through him. He hoped he was taking the brunt of it; Bingwen's smaller frame couldn't handle this. Better Mazer die than the both of them.
A Formic's face appeared above him, gazing down at Mazer, its head cocked to the side, regarding him, or mocking him, or both.
The gun was still strapped to Mazer's wrist. He had to raise it, aim it, fire it. The Formic was only a meter away, he couldn't miss. It would be easy. They would kill Bingwen if he didn't do something. They would spray the mist in his face as they had done to the boy's parents and to Danwen, and they would toss Bingwen's body onto the pile of biomass and melt it into sludge.
Mazer's mind ordered his arm to move, screamed for it to obey, to animate, to twist a few centimeters, just enough to point the barrel in the right direction, but nothing happened. His hand remained mockingly still.