Earth Afire (The First Formic War 2)

"Please."

Felix bowed and backed out the door. Chubs was already setting up the encryption equipment, attaching it to the necessary panels. Then he got out a sniffer wand and passed it around the room.

"It's clean," he said.

So no one was eavesdropping. Lem nodded, and Chubs went out into the hall to keep Montroose from snooping.

Lem entered the coordinates and commands that would send the message from Luna's receiver into an encrypted relay system that went directly to Father's handheld. It would be a tedious process. There would be a lot of lag time. Lem would send three copies of each message, so that if data was lost by one, it would be filled in by the second or third transmission, hopefully making the messages appear seamless. Then Father would dictate a reply, and the process would go in reverse. If this actually worked, Lem was going to be here a while. He spoke into the dictation device, starting small.

"Father, it's Lem."

An hour later he received a reply. It came faster than he expected. THANK GOD!! I'VE BEEN WORRIED SICK. WHERE ARE YOU?

Lem read the words several times, and his heart lifted. Father had worried about him. Lem had known that of course. He knew Father would be concerned, but to hear, or rather read, those words made it more real somehow. He found it so surprising in fact, that he began to wonder if it was really Father on the other end. Maybe one of the ships along the chain had figured out the encryption and was impersonating Father in the hope of garnering valuable information. Lem decided to play it safe. He sent one word.

"Apple."

"For crying out loud, Lem. It's me. Your father. You're using my encrypted line. You're sending an encrypted message. You don't have to use the stupid corporate code words for verification. Now you've wasted two damn hours, and you still haven't answered my question. WHERE ARE YOU?!!"

It was Father all right.

For the next message Lem started talking and didn't stop for forty minutes. The dictation software turned it all into a lengthy e-mail. He told Father how they had bumped El Cavador off the asteroid; how the bump had resulted in the death of a free miner; how they had successfully decimated the asteroid with the glaser; how they had encountered El Cavador again and conducted an assault on the Formic ship; how they had failed and lost men and rushed back toward Luna; how they had found evidence of the Battle of the Belt; how they were only a week away; how they had decelerated to the depot to make sure there was still a Luna to come home to. He didn't tell Father everything, such as his struggles on the ship to keep authority.

Any lingering doubt about it being Father on the other end vanished when the reply came.

"I've always known you to be an intelligent person, Lem, so I can't for the life of me begin to understand what would compel you to do something so monumentally stupid, so enormously idiotic as bumping a free-miner ship off an asteroid. I don't care that the next closest asteroid was four months away. I would much rather have you sit on your butt during an eight-month round-trip than have you risk damaging a piece of equipment worth several billion credits. What were you thinking? Did you not consider what such a violent jolt might have done to the glaser? Did it not cross your mind for a second that the glaser is more precious to this company than your time? It's a prototype, Lem. One of a kind. For your sake, I hope it's in perfect working condition. If it isn't, you will have a hard time proving to our attorneys that your jolt isn't responsible."

Lem shook hi

s head. So like Father. No mention of the dead free miner. No congratulations for having conducted a successful test. No praise for having gone the extra mile and figuring out a way to extract the minerals from the debris cloud. No inquiry as to the safety of the crew. All Father worried about was his precious glaser.

And then to have the gall to threaten Lem with legal action? All the bitterness and frustration he felt for Father began to well up inside him again.

But then Lem reread the last sentence of the message and saw another meaning. Father might be insinuating that he didn't have control over the legal team, that his grip on command of the company might be slipping. That gave Lem a small measure of delight. Lem still fully intended to seize the company, and any potential weakness in Father's standing was welcome news.

Another message from Father appeared.

"I like the name 'Formic,' by the way. No one has given the species a name that sticks. Everyone keeps saying 'aliens,' which I've always thought is a ridiculous word. Formic I can get behind. A nice hard K sound at the end. And I like the connection with ants. Tell Benyawe we're going with that. I'll have it on the networks in the morning. As for the skirmish with the Formic ship, you did good. I'm glad you're alive. Once again, it was astronomically stupid, but it demonstrated great courage. I'm sad it didn't work. Had you stopped the ship, you could have prevented a lot of heartache and disaster. Thousands are dying in China. It's surreal."

Father was answering Lem's message in pieces, probably responding to it as he read it. Again, it was classic Father. Give an inkling of praise and then squash it with stated disappointment. It took courage, then "had you stopped it, all these people wouldn't have died." As if it were Lem's fault that the Formics were killing civilians, as if all those deaths were on Lem's hands because he had failed in the battle.

Nobody else would probably read it that way, Lem knew, but nobody knew Father as well as he did. Pat you on the back with one hand, stab you in the back with the other.

A third message. A short one.

"Send me the names of the crewmen you lost. I want to notify their families immediately."

It surprised Lem. A bit of humanity from Father. Lem hadn't intended to share that information, but of course he should have. He had been the insensitive one this time. Why hadn't he thought of that? It should have been the first thing he shared.

Lem typed in the names he remembered. Only two-thirds of them came to mind, and some of those were probably wrong. Was it O'Brien or O'Ryan? Canterglast? Or Caunterglast? He needed to get the spelling right for Father to find them in the company's database and look up the next of kin. Lem searched through his holopad. The names weren't there. Embarrassed, he stepped out into the hall and found Chubs, hovering by the door. Lem explained the situation.

"I'll type them in for you," said Chubs. He pulled himself into the room and tapped away at the keyboard, making corrections to the names Lem had put in and adding in the ones Lem had forgotten. No hesitating, no stopping to jog his memory; the names just came out of him. He knew these people. They had meant something to him.

He finished. "There you go."

Lem didn't meet his eye, embarrassed. "Thank you."

"You ready for some food? You've been in here a few hours."