Earth Awakens (The First Formic War 3)

He intensified the laser, set it to the proper depth, and quickly cut out a small hole no bigger than his finger. Then he inserted the snake camera through the hole to see what was on the other side. He couldn't see much. The space was dark and empty, a crawlspace perhaps, or a shaft of some sort. Whatever it was it was clearly big enough for him to climb into. And more importantly, it was free of Formics.

He retracted the snake, cut a hole large enough for his body to pass through, pushed the cut piece into the ship, and shined his light inside.

The shaft was a meter high and four meters wide. It extended to his right and left as far as he could see, sloping downward in either direction, matching the bulbous curvature of the ship. The walls were discolored and unattractive, covered with rust, blemishes, bumps, and imperfections, like scrap metal left to oxidize in a damp place for a few hundred years. It was almost as if the interior of the ship had been built with crude, unrefined ore, creating an ugly canvas of browns and grays and touches of black that felt dingy and ancient and long ignored.

The air in the shaft was no cleaner. Dust motes and clumps of small, misshapen brown matter floated everywhere. Victor looked at his wrist pad and read the sensors. "Air is twenty-four percent oxygen. That's only slightly higher than Earth, Imala. The rest is nitrogen, argon, and a touch of carbon dioxide. I could breathe this if I wanted to."

"I wouldn't," said Imala. "There could be traces of other elements in the air that we can't detect but are lethal, even in small doses."

"I wasn't planning on taking my helmet off, Imala. Not with all this dung in the air."

"Dung?"

He delicately poked a clump of brown matter hovering nearby, pushing it away. "I'm guessing that's not mud."

"Gross. What is this place? A sewer line?"

"Either that or the Formics don't have a good waste-disposal system. Maybe the whole ship's this way." He climbed through the hole and into the shaft, pulling his duffel bag in behind him. Then he grabbed the circle of wall he had cut out and pressed it back into place, using magnets to hold it tight. The hole he had cut for the snake camera was still uncovered, so he capp

ed it with a metal patch from his duffel bag. If someone came along and studied the hole, they would see something was amiss, but the walls were so discolored and random that the magnets and patch were fairly camouflaged.

He stuffed his tools back into his bag and slung the bag back over his shoulder. The lights from his helmet moved around the shaft, taking in his surroundings. "There are grooves in the floor, Imala, like tracks. Maybe two inches deep, running the length of the shaft. I count three of them. The Formics must have equipment that runs on them."

"How do you know which wall is the floor?"

"Educated guess," he said. "The Formics can walk upright, but they're tunnel dwellers. They prefer to crawl and don't require a lot of headroom. So width is more important than height. You could fit four Formics abreast in here. That would allow for several lanes of traffic and tracks for moving equipment."

"So where do you go now?"

Victor looked to his right and left. Neither way gave any hint as to where it might lead. "There are fewer floaties in the air to the right," he said. "I take this as a good sign."

He rotated his body to the right, placed his feet on opposite walls and pushed off, shooting upward. As the shaft curved, he pushed lightly off the walls to course correct himself, keeping his forward momentum, the wall inches from his face.

"It's good you're not claustrophobic," said Imala.

"I was born and raised on a mining ship, Imala. I was a mechanic like my father. He used to send me into HVAC ducts and tight spaces when I was four years old to reach things he couldn't. I've spent half my life crammed into places much narrower than--"

He grabbed the wall and stopped himself; then he blinked out a command and killed his helmet lights.

"What's wrong?" asked Imala.

Victor lowered his voice. "Ahead. I saw light."

It had appeared for only an instant, a faint green dot of light that had zipped from one side of the tunnel to the other before disappearing. Victor hovered there, squinting into the blackness, looking for it. Had he imagined it? A trick of the eye?

No, there it was again, a circle of light no bigger than his thumb twenty meters ahead of him. It shot back across the width of the passage and came to rest on the opposite side, glowing softly.

"What is that?" Imala said. "A firefly?"

Victor zoomed in with his visor and got a better look. The bug was perched on a mud nest built onto the side of the wall, its bulbous belly pulsing with light, filling that section of the shaft with a greenish hue. Its body was small, maybe four centimeters long--yellow and brown flecked with spots of red. Its four legs clung to the nest as it lazily flapped its two sets of wings. The hind wings were transparent and three times as long as its body. They glimmered and shone in the light of its bioluminescence. The forewings were much shorter and shell-like, as if they provided protection to the thorax and abdomen whenever they were pulled in flat across the back.

"I think we just discovered another alien species," said Imala.

"Let's hope it's not as nasty as the Formics," said Victor.

"I don't see any stingers or pincers."

"Even so, I'll give it a wide berth and hope it ignores us." He pushed off the wall and continued forward, steering toward the side of the shaft opposite the bug. When he was level with it, a second glow bug appeared to his right, crawling out of another nest Victor hadn't noticed.