Earth Awakens (The First Formic War 3)

But he couldn't. His head was in a blender, thrown every way imaginable as his orientation shifted, spun, flipped.

He couldn't blink the commands. He couldn't steady his eyes and focus on his HUD. He tried raising his hands to the holofield, but as soon as he moved his arm, the centripetal force threw it elsewhere.

It was happening again. He was killing everyone aboard.

Somewhere far away--below them, above them, Mazer couldn't be sure--three grenades detonated, and a fireball lit up the sky then was gone, ripped from his vision as the HERC continued to spin.

Mazer tightened his grip on the stick and centered himself. Blackness was appearing at the edges of his vision. He was going to pass out. He blinked, fighting back, trying to focus.

Down, up, right, left. None of it was clear to him.

The stone, he reminded himself. I swallowed the stone.

He was tangata whenua, he told himself, person of the land, born of the earth, voice of the earth, made strong by the earth. Air, mountains, insects, all bound by mauri. Only the tangata whenua could control that energy.

Father didn't believe it. Father cursed it all.

But Mother believed it.

And Mother was stronger.

He stopped fighting the centripetal forces. He stopped trying to right himself, to be rigid, to control it. Instead he let go. He closed his eyes. His arms went limp, his mind as well. The ringing and alarms and violent rush of air blowing through the hole where the windshield had been. All of that was somewhere else. That was a different power. A weaker one. He was the son of Papatuanuku. Mother Earth. And all that belonged to her belonged to him. Even gravity itself.

He opened his eyes. The readings on his HUD should have alarmed him. They were dropping too fast, spinning too wildly. The grav lenses were damaged, flashing SYSTEM FAILURE. He wouldn't be able to stop the HERC with the lenses. His heart should have sunk. Despair should have settled in.

But instead he felt a great calm. A gathering of his senses. A focusing of his mind.

He had the rotor blades. If he could stop the spinning, the blades would deploy.

But how to stop the spinning? The jet engines wouldn't help, he had no wings for lift, and engaging them might only sling them faster down to the earth.

The solution came at once. Clear and precise. A definitive course of action. And yet it wasn't born from any previous experience or something he had read or studied on the subject. As far as he knew, it had never been attempted. And yet it was glaringly obvious.

There were emergency chutes of course, but he couldn't deploy them all at once in a spin. They would tangle, collapse, be worthless.

But ... if he deployed them one at a time, in quick succession, each at a moment when the spin was angled in such a way to allow the chute to fully extend and fill with air--even for only a moment. And if he then detached the chute, a second or two later, before the continuing rotation entangled the ropes and made it impossible for the blades to deploy--then maybe, just maybe, each chute could slow the spinning and stabilize the HERC just enough for the blades to deploy.

His hands--shaking and yet somehow steady--reached into the holofield. It was instinct now. Honed by hundreds of simulations, thousands of flight hours, and a lifetime of reading his gut.

Calmly, resolutely, as his body was slung back and forth in his harness, he waited, focusing his equilibrium to a single point in space, sensing the forces around him, seeing a pattern in the randomness of the spins. Then he felt it coming, the right twist, the right angle.

He released the first chute.

There was a pop, a violent jolt as the chute filled, and then Mazer cut it loose. They were still spinning, but slower now.

The second chute deployed, caught, and detached.

Then the third.

A jolt. Detached.

Then the sweetest sound he had ever heard. A bang, like a starter pistol, as the charges blew and the rotor blades that were folded back like cockroach wings snapped forward into place and began to sing.

CHAPTER 8

Secrets

Lem Jukes woke in a bed that was not his own with a woman's arm draped across his chest. Slowly, gently, so as not to wake her, he lifted the arm, set it aside, and slid off the mattress, making as little sound as possible. He tiptoed out of the bedroom a moment later in his T-shirt and boxers and made his way to the kitchen where he had seen a small vid screen the night before. The screen hung beneath the kitchen cabinets. Lem turned it on, put the volume on low, and flipped through the channels until he found a news feed.