Earth Afire (The First Formic War) (13 page)

When he was done, he woke the others, and they gathered around a table in a small room near the cockpit where the engine noise was less.

“The mission’s a true JCET,” said Mazer. “Usually it’s just us training the host nation. This time, the Chinese will be training us, as well.”

“On what?” asked Fatani. “How to use chopsticks?”

“Oh, you’re real classy,” said Patu.

“We’ll be trained on a digging vehicle they’ve developed,” said Mazer.

Reinhardt made a face. “Digging vehicle? We’re giving them the world’s first antigrav bird, an aircraft that will revolutionize flight, and they’re giving us a bulldozer? Lame.”

“Double lame,” Patu agreed.

“We don’t know it’s a dozer,” said Mazer. “We don’t know anything about it, in fact. There was next to nothing on it in the cube.”

“A digging machine,” Reinhardt repeated. “Six months away from home to learn how to dig with a fancy Chinese shovel. I hate this mission already.”

They landed a little over an hour later at a military airfield northeast of Qingyuan. Two lines of Chinese soldiers in full-parade dress faced each other at attention at the end of the plane’s cargo ramp. Captain Shenzu, the Chinese officer from the HERC mission, stood at the bottom of the ramp and saluted. “Welcome to China, Captain Rackham.”

“You beat us here,” said Mazer.

“You’ll forgive me for taking more comfortable accommodations. The Chinese government would have granted you the same convenience, but we would much rather have you guarding our precious cargo.”

Mazer gestured back to the HERCs. “There they are. All dolled up and ready for action. When it’s convenient for you and your commanding officer, I’d like to discuss our training regimen.”

Captain Shenzu smiled and waved the suggestion aside. “All in good time, Captain. Come.” He motioned to a skimmer parked to their right. “The drill sledges are about to surface. Your timing could not have been better.”

They flew northeast out of the airfield, cut across open country, and pulled up to an aboveground concrete bunker on the crest of a shallow, barren valley. The valley floor was riddled with deep gaping holes, each big enough to fly the skimmer into. Shenzu parked, hopped out, and escorted them around the bunker to the opposite side overlooking the valley floor.

“You said ‘drill sledges,’” Mazer said in Chinese. “Are these the drilling machines you’ll train us to operate?”

“Your pronunciation is quite good,” said Shenzu.

“We all speak Chinese,” said Mazer. “Part of our training.”

Shenzu seemed pleased. “China is flattered that you would think our language important enough to learn, Captain.”

“You are the largest country in the world,” said Reinhardt.

“The largest, yes,” said Shenzu, “but sadly not the most technologically advanced. The U.S. and a few countries in Europe have us beat on that front. As well as the Russians, though they don’t have the economic stability that we do. It’s only a matter of time before we leave them all behind.”

“You sound rather confident,” said Mazer.

Shenzu was looking at something on his holopad. “In three seconds, Captain, I think you’ll see why.”

Mazer felt slight tremors in the earth beneath him and heard a muffled rumbling noise. He turned and scanned the valley but saw nothing. Then a massive spinning drill bit burst through the surface, slinging dirt and detritus in every direction in a violent shower of debris. The drill shot upward in a blur of motion, and Mazer saw that it was the front half of a massive tunneling vehicle, rocketing upward from the ground. The engines screamed, and red hot ejecta erupted from the rear of the vehicle as it soared three meters in the air and then slammed back down to the surface. The lavalike spew from the rear continued to bubble out and drip to the ground as the engines whined down and the drill began to slow. Smoke rose from the spew, and Mazer heard the sizzling heat of it even from this distance. A felled tree that had caught a shot of the spew crackled and began to burn.

Mazer opened his mouth to speak just as two more of the tunneling vehicles burst from the ground elsewhere in the valley, one of them getting a little more elevation on its exit than the first one had.

After the sledges landed and began to quiet, Shenzu smiled and said, “You’ll have to excuse them. They’re showing off. They know they have an audience.”

“What are they?” asked Patu.

“We call them self-propelled drill sledges, but they’re tactical earth burrowers. Quite extraordinary, aren’t they?”

That was putting it lightly, thought Mazer. The HERC might revolutionize flight, but the drill sledge revolutionized warfare, introducing an entirely new landscape to the battlefield. He immediately understood why the Chinese wanted the HERCs. The HERC could carry the sledges behind enemy lines, drop them off, and leave them to their digging. The two vehicles made the perfect assault team.

“What’s their range?” asked Mazer.

“Only ten kilometers,” said Shenzu. “But we’re hoping to improve that.”

Ten kilometers. That was more than Mazer would have suspected. “Are they weaponized?”

Shenzu laughed. “We’ll have plenty of time for questions later. Come. I’d like you to see them up close.”

They descended the valley and approached the nearest drill sledge. The entire cockpit was now encased in a thin layer of frost.

“It’s cold,” said Reinhardt, touching the surface.

“We keep the cockpit as cold as possible,” said Shenzu. “We have to. Otherwise the pilot would be cremated, as in burned to ashes, bones and all.”

There was a cracking sound as ice broke away from where the cockpit hatch sealed against the sledge’s roof. The hatch opened, and a pilot climbed out and waved. He wore a helmet with a wide visor and lights on the top and sides. Mazer could see a hint of frost around the visor’s edges as the pilot nimbly climbed down from the sledge. His thin body suit was lined with small coils that ran up and down his body and around his appendages like a continuous nest of very thin snakes. Every part of him, head to toe, wafted cool mist like a hunk of meat pulled straight from the freezer.

“It’s called a ‘cool-suit,’” said Shenzu. “The drill sledges work like an earthworm. Whatever it digs through in the front, be it clay or rock or whatever, is ejected out the back. The propulsion doesn’t come from the biting action at the front. It actually comes from the backward ejection of the superheated debris.”

Off to the side, a team of Chinese soldiers was putting out the fire on the felled tree and spraying the other mounds of spew with canisters of compressed chemicals, sending hissing clouds of steam into the air.

“When the sledge is moving fast through solid stone, it spews back lava,” said Shenzu. “You don’t want to follow one when that happens.”

“How does it handle such lava-hot ejecta?” asked Mazer. “Seems like the spew would burn through any piping system.”

“Very observant,” said Shenzu. “That was one of the most difficult challenges. It’s like the problem of the universal solvent: What do you store it in?” He pointed to the rear of the drill bit. “A series of internal tubes begins here at the nose and extends back to the spew end. The tubes are continuously water cooled. Each is wrapped in a network of thin water pipes that are pumped from a refrigeration unit at the rear of the sledge.

“But even with the cooling system, the entire cockpit is superheated when the sledge is chewing rock. That’s why we have the cool-suits. We keep the cockpit as cold as possible because when you hit rock and go into hyperfast mode, the heat produced is incredible, well above boiling temperature. The suits kick in to cool the body and counter the heat. Then, when the sledge slows down, and the heat descends, the cockpit has excess cooling and the temperature drops to freezing. At that point the cool-suit reverses its process and channels warmth to the body.”

“Sounds like a temperature roller coaster for the pilot,” said Fatani.

“It takes some getting used to,” admitted Shenzu. “Sweltering heat one moment, teeth-chattering cold the next.”

“I’ve been doing this for months,” said the pilot, “and I’m still not used to it. But it’s a such a ride, I’d dig all day if they’d let me.”

“You said it had
hyperfast
mode?” asked Mazer.

“Speed is relative,” said Shenzu. “We consider it fast for a drill sledge.”

“How fast?” asked Mazer.

“We’ve topped them out at twenty-four kilometers per hour.”

“Through rock?” Mazer was stunned.

“Oh yes. When it’s gophering along, going normal speed, it runs about half that. But if you hit rock and punch it, if you go hot, she burns a hole through the ground.”

“So rock is faster?” asked Patu.

“More propulsion,” said Shenzu.

“What about communication?” asked Fatani. “Radio doesn’t go through dirt.”

“Infrasound,” said the pilot. “Elephant speech. It’s slower than regular speech, so the receiver speeds it up so you can hear it. There’s a time lag, though, as if you were talking to someone on the moon. Rocks carry the infrasound digitally, but you can’t receive anything when you’re going hot. Gophering you can hear. But when you punch it, you’re on your own.”

Shenzu waved over a Chinese soldier. The man approached carrying a helmet atop a neatly folded cool-suit. Shenzu took them both and handed them to Mazer. “We took the liberty of pulling your sizes from your files and making you each a suit. As the commanding officer of your team, Captain Rackham, we thought you’d like the honor of going first.”

“Now?” said Mazer. “I have no idea how to drive it yet.”

“This drill sledge fits two,” said Shenzu. “Not comfortably, I’m afraid, but it’s how we train our pilots. Lieutenant Wong here will take you for your first dig.”

“Relieve your bladder first,” said Wong. “Once we start digging we can’t pull over, and you do not want to go in your suit. Nothing’s worse than ice crotch.”

Mazer changed in the bunker and returned a few minutes later. The suit was tight, and the coils felt awkward. The ones on his inner thighs kept rubbing against each other, so he waddled and stepped bowleggedly.

“How does the suit feel?” asked Shenzu.

“It’s not freezing yet,” said Mazer, “so I can’t complain.”

The drill sledge was now held up in the air at a fifty-degree angle by long spindly legs that extended from the sides of it like legs on a granddaddy long-leg spider. The drill bit was pointed down toward the earth, less than a meter off the ground.

“The legs get it into a diving position,” said Shenzu. “It can’t dig down when it’s horizontal on the surface unless it’s entering into the side of a mountain.”

A collapsible ladder extended down from the cockpit. Lieutenant Wong was already up in the forward seat waiting. Mazer ascended the ladder and awkwardly climbed into the narrow seat behind him, nearly kicking Wong in the head as he brought his foot around. It was extremely close quarters, with only Wong’s seatback between them. Mazer found the chest harness and buckled in as Wong retracted the ladder and closed the cockpit, cutting out all exterior light. The glow from the cockpit instrumentation bathed them both in red and green, and Mazer leaned as far as he could to the side to see the front. A small holo of the drill sledge appeared in the air above the console.

“How do you know what’s ahead of you?” asked Mazer.

“Depth gauges,” said Wong. “They measure the density of mass ahead.” He made an adjustment to the holofield, and a colorful cross section of the earth appeared. “The darker areas are thickest,” he said, gesturing at the holo. “Probably granite. Hit those and you go hot, really cruising. The brighter spots like these here and here are soft earth, such as clay.”

“What about those white lines that crisscross through the image?”

“Those are tunnels we’ve dug with the drill sledges in the past. They’re all over this valley. It’s like a man-sized anthill beneath us.”

“What happens if you hit water? Like an underground lake or spring?”

“Better to avoid those. We try not to screw up the water table, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Hit a water source on a dive, and the water chases you down the hole, like pulling the plug in the bathtub. Water isn’t much of a propulsion, either. It all goes to steam. So hitting water is like hitting the brakes. That’s why you always want to aim for rock. You ready?”

“Go easy on me.”

“There’s nothing easy about these babies.”

He made a few hand gestures in the holofield, and the drill bit roared to life, spinning quickly almost immediately and getting up to a screaming whine in less than ten seconds. The cockpit vibrated. Mazer felt as if his bones were rattling.

“What about the legs outside?” Mazer said into his radio.

“They’ll fold in automatically once we start down,” said Wong. “Get ready for a burst of cold. The suit cools instantly the moment we start digging. It’s kind of a shock.”

“Roger that,” said Mazer, though in fact he wasn’t the least bit ready. Diving underground felt unnatural. This is what we do with our dead, he told himself. Suddenly a dozen questions sprang to his mind. What happens if there’s a malfunction and the drilling stops? How do you repair that? How could anyone rescue you? Had that happened before? Was there a Chinese pilot somewhere deep underground, buried with his stalled drill sledge, dead of asphyxiation?

And then there was a brief drop and a momentary jolt forward as the drill bit hit the earth and tore into the surface.

Then spew shot out the back, and they were surging downward.

An instant later a blast of cold hit Mazer so quickly that he felt as if he had fallen into icy water. His muscles constricted; his teeth clenched; his hands clung to the armrests. He wasn’t going to die, he knew, and yet the fear of it wrapped its tendrils around his heart and squeezed.

Kim would love this, he told himself. She was like a kid when it came to amusement park rides. The scarier the better.

The drill sledge dropped a few meters as it hit a tunnel, and Mazer felt momentarily weightless. Then the drill sledge hit earth again, and Mazer strained against his chest harness.