Earth Unaware (The First Formic War 1)

Isabella's voice came on the line. "Chepe, it's Isabella. I'm at the helm. Can you send your helmet vid feed over the line?"

The video from Chepe's helmet appeared on Victor's HUD. Now everyone saw what Chepe saw. There were bodies drifting in a dark space. The room--what Victor could see of it--looked like barracks, with hammocks and storage compartments for clothes and personal items. Glow rods in the room offered some light, but they had dimmed to almost nothing. Chepe's helmet lights illuminated a few faces, and Victor saw at once that there was no reviving these people. Some had eyes open, staring into nothing, the look of death forever frozen on their faces. Men. Women. A young child. Victor recognized a few of them from the week the Italians had spent with them. That woman there had been holding an infant back on El Cavador during one of the feasts--Victor distinctly remembered--but she held no infant now. And that man, he had sung with a few other men during that same feast, a song that had left them all laughing.

"Bang on the hatch," said Isabella. "See if anyone responds. Watch for movement."

Chepe took a tool from his pouch and banged it hard against the hatch. Victor watched. Chepe's lights swept the room through the glass, pausing at each person. He banged again. A third time. A fourth. No one moved.

Janda wasn't among them. Victor was sure of it. Even those who were turned away, whose faces he could not see, he knew the size and shape of her body enough to know she wasn't here.

"We could put a bubble over the hatch and send in Chepe to run vitals on those people," said Isabella. "But that's going to take time, and right now every second counts."

A bubble was a small inflatable dome that could be hermetically sealed over an external hatch. If Chepe was inside the bubble when it inflated and sealed over the hatch, then he could open the hatch and go inside without exposing the room beyond to the vacuum of space. Bubbles could be dangerous, though, as they required you to momentarily detach your lifeline to climb inside. The lifeline was attached to a valve on the bubble's exterior. This fed to an extendable lifeline inside the bubble, which restored air and power to the suit wearer. But detaching your lifeline, even momentarily was a risk.

"I'd say it's highly unlikely we'll find anyone alive in there," said Isabella. "I suggest we press on and look for signs of life."

"Agreed," said Concepcion. "Return to the ship. Let's keep moving."

"We're just leaving them there?" said Toron.

"There's nothing we can do for them, Toron," said Concepcion. "But there may be others we can reach in time."

Victor felt hopeless then. These people had survived the attack. All the factors that Victor had considered critical for survival had been met. And yet all of them were gone. He pictured them alive, huddled around a heater, clinging to each other, speaking words of comfort. How long had they lasted? Twelve hours? Fifteen? Had they known El Cavador was coming? Had they believed rescue was imminent? Or did they think themselves all alone, waiting out the inevitable?

Victor looked at Toron beside him and saw that Father had a hand on Toron's shoulder, comforting him. Toron looked pale, even in the low light of the cargo bay.

"They had masks and heaters," said Father. "That's a good sign, Toron. It means there's equipment out there."

"Little good it did them," said Toron.

Chepe and Pitoso landed back in the airlock, and the ship moved on. The bay doors remained open as they continued to patrol through the destruction. Twice more they stopped, and twice more Chepe and Pitoso flew out to investigate. One of the wrecks was empty. The other had a massive hole in the back that hadn't been visible until Chepe and Pitoso went in for a closer look. There were no signs of survivors.

The ship moved on. As they continued patrolling they passed more bodies. Most were men. But there were women, too. And children. One burned terribly. Victor turned away.

Once, a corpse floated uncomfortably close to the open airlock, right there in front of them. It was a man. A boy, really. No more than twenty. He could have been a suitor for Janda if he wasn't married already. His eyes were--thankfully--closed. The miners nearest the edge could have reached out and touched him, and for a horrific moment Victor thought the body might float inside. But the ship moved on, and the body slipped past.

No one spoke. Several of the miners glanced back at Toron to see how he was taking it, the compassion evident on their faces. Toron never said a word, and as the minutes stretched into an hour, Victor's hope began to dissolve. There was too much wreckage. They had come too late. Nineteen hours was far too long. Perhaps if they hadn't stopped to install the pebble-killers or scatter Marco's ashes, if they had accelerated then instead of decelerating, maybe they could have saved someone; maybe they could have stopped this whole thing from happening.

No, they couldn't have arrived before the attack. Even if they had pushed themselves and never slowed. And what good would it have done if they had been here? They'd be just as dead as everyone else.

A large piece of wreckage came along the ship. The biggest piece yet. El Cavador's retros fired, and the ship slowed. Victor couldn't imagine how anyone could be alive inside. The whole structure was twisted, not just the ends. And none of the sides were smooth with hull plating, suggesting that it had come from somewhere deep inside a ship.

Approaching it would be difficult. Sharp twisted beams and other jagged structural pieces protruded from all sides in a random fashion, like a crushed metal can wrapped in iron thorns. Chepe and Pitoso flew down cautiously, circling the wreckage from a distance. "I see a hatch," said Chepe. "It's solid. No windows."

"Can you get close enough to bang on it?" asked Bahzim.

Victor watched Chepe's approach via the man's vid feed. Chepe drifted to the hatch slowly, steering clear of the jagged girders and beams.

"Watch his line, Pitoso," said Bahzim.

Chepe settled on the hull beside the hatch. "The space around the hatch looks smooth," he said. "We could get a bubble around it if we needed." He banged on the hatch, then pressed his hand against the metal. He wouldn't hear a knock response from anyone inside, but he would feel the vibration of it. Chepe waited a full minute and knocked again. After a pause, "I don't feel anything."

The wreckage was drifting and rotating. One of the jagged beams was coming close to Chepe's lifeline. "Back off," said Bahzim. "She's spinning."

Chepe and Pitoso pushed off from the wreckage and floated a short distance away as the wreckage slowly spun in front of them. The far side of it, which hadn't been visible before, turned into view of the cargo bay. It was a mess of twisted channel beams and girder framework, bent and mangled together, worse even than the other sides. But through that, beyond the web of distorted metal, was a corridor, maybe ten meters deep, like a shallow cave, with the entrance to it pinched half closed. Victor zoomed in with his visor and strained to see through all the obstructions, trying to see down into the corridor.

Then he saw it.

A flicker of light. A movement. There was a hatch at the end of the corridor with a small circular window in the center. And in that window there was a light. A glow rod. Wiggling in someone's hand. "There's somebody inside!" Victor shouted, and before he knew what he was doing, he had pushed his way to the end of the airlock and jumped out into space.