"Maybe we don't have to," said Imala. "Laserlines work over short distances. If we get close enough, maybe they can feed us news directly to the ship."
When they were less than a hundred klicks away, Imala used the laserline to hail the station.
The head of a portly woman appeared in the holofield.
"I'd ask for a docking tube," said Imala, "but it doesn't look like you have one available."
"We don't. You're welcome to patch in to our news feeds, though."
"You're getting broadcasts from Luna?"
"We're getting text only," said the woman. "The bandwidth doesn't handle voice or video."
"How are you getting even that?" said Imala. "We can't get anything."
"We've set up a string of ships between us and Luna," said the woman, "with a ship every million klicks or so. Like a bucket brigade. They're passing up information via laserline as it becomes available. It's not a perfect system, mind you. The deterioration you usually get in ten million klicks happens in a hundred thousand now. So in a million klicks you can barely make out a very slow transmission. The ships have to repeat the message three times and make the best guess about some passages, but even so you're going to get some deterioration and holes in the text. Shall I send you the codes for the uplink?"
"Yes. Please," said Imala.
"There's a fee," said the woman.
"You're charging me for the news?"
"Keeping relay ships out there isn't cheap. News wouldn't get through otherwise."
"How much?" asked Imala.
The woman told them a ridiculous amount. Imala wanted to argue, but Victor said, "I'll pay it." His family had left him money for his education at a university. He could spare some of it here.
Five minutes later text from various news feeds appeared on their monitor. The reports were riddled with holes and sentence fragments, but Victor and Imala got the gist of each report.
Victor had hoped that a fleet had been assembled, but it quickly became evident that such wasn't the case. STASA was calling for calm and pushing for diplomacy, seeking for ways to communicate with the hormigas when they arrived. The U.N. had conducted an emergency summit as Ukko Jukes had suggested, but all that political circus had accomplished was to appoint the Egyptian ambassador, Kenwe Zubeka, as the secretary of alien affairs, a new position with zero power or influence. Zubeka seemed not to notice how insignificant his position was and kept making asinine statements to the press.
When asked about the destroyed ships in the Belt, Zubeka had said, "We don't know what kind of misunderstanding or provocation our alien visitors were responding to. As soon as we can talk to them, I'm sure we can have a peaceful conversation that will benefit both our species."
"Are you kidding me?" said Victor. "A misunderstanding? He's calling the murder of thousands of people a misunderstanding? When they killed the Italians, it wasn't a misunderstanding. It was deliberate. They knew what they were doing."
"It's typical geopolitics, Vico. Few countries have any military presence in space. Most of the bigger powers have shuttles and cargo vessels that are space-ready and could be weaponized, but to form a fleet, to amass enough ships to stage an assault or form a blockade, we need a coalition. The U.S., Russia, China, India, France. These countries don't work well together. The Chinese don't trust the Russians, India doesn't trust the Chinese, and the U.S. doesn't trust anybody, except for maybe a few countries in Europe. And no country wants to act on their own. If they go alone they risk crippling their ships and weakening their arsenal. That would make them vulnerable to other powers."
"So they're going to do nothing? Why does everyone seem to believe that inaction is the best course of action?"
"Caution is their action, Vico. Or at least
that's their justification. They're sitting tight to see what happens. Everyone is hoping this will resolve itself. They're acting like humans always act when war seems inevitable and most of the variables are still unknown. They're playing the good-guy card and waiting for the other guy to shoot first."
"The Formics don't shoot first, Imala. They rip apart. They find life and they destroy it. They're not interested in diplomacy or gathering around a table and making friends. They're interested in breaking us wide open and bleeding us dry."
They read on, but the situation only worsened. Riots were springing up all over the world--people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action. Deaths were reported. Governments continued to call for calm. The media discussed the vids Victor and Imala had uploaded as well. Experts scrutinized every detail, spending far too much time excusing the media for initially ignoring the vids. The vids did, after all, look like so many spookers out there.
When they finished reading, Victor said, "We can't move on, Imala. We're not leaving this depot. Not yet. Not until we see how this plays out."
None of the other ships at the depot moved on either. And over the next few days, the number of ships only grew. Victor and Imala programmed the monitor to alert them whenever a new message came through, regardless of whether they were sleeping or not.
They stayed for days, reading the reports aloud to each other the moment they came in. Sometimes Victor became so frustrated with the idiocy of governments or the press that he would tell Imala to stop reading. Then he would retreat to the back of the shuttle to cool off.
"All that effort," he told her, "all that time spent in the quickship so that Earth could prepare, so that countries could muster enough resources to take action, and nobody is doing anything." He wanted to cry. He wanted to reach down through space and shake someone. "How can they be so fundamentally wrong?"
"Because the world doesn't think like a free-miner family, Vico," Imala said. "We're not one people. We're splintered, too concerned about our own people and agendas and borders. We're one planet, but you wouldn't know it by looking at us."