Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (32 page)

Victor moved to intercede, but Father was quicker, crawling past him and lunging at the creature. “Get the extractor on that grappling arm,” Father yelled. “Now!”

Victor moved for the arm and snapped the claw around the base of it. He cranked the setting up to maximum and pulled out as much heat as he could. He looked back to Father and Toron and saw that the creature was gone, knocked off the ship by one of them. Toron was on his back, his knee magnets turned around to the back of his legs, holding his lower body against the hull. Father was kneeling over him, clinging to the stomach of Toron’s suit.

“Victor. Help me,” said Father.

Victor hurried over and saw at once that Toron was badly wounded. The front of Toron’s suit over his abdomen was ripped and bloody. Father was trying desperately to hold the punctured suit closed. Toron was coughing up blood into his helmet, and his eyes weren’t focused.

“What do I do?” said Victor.

“We need to seal the suit,” said Father. “Hurry.”

Victor tore at his hip pouch for the tape.

Every suit had a fail-safe system inside it in case of a puncture: Straps would tighten and rings of airtight foam would inflate inside the suit to seal off the punctured area and prevent an oxygen leak. Without these emergency sealants, you’d quickly lose all air pressure and die in fifteen to thirty seconds. The problem was, the seals were never perfect. Air always seeped out, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but air always found a way. If anything, the sealants were designed to give you a few extra minutes at most to get back inside the ship before you asphyxiated or your body fluids began to boil. Tape could help seal the puncture if the hole was small enough, but it wasn’t the golden solution, especially on a puncture as big as Toron’s.

Victor found the tape and hit the mechanism on the side to eject a foot-long strip of adhesive.

“Put it here,” said Father, “where my fingers are. Hurry.”

The suit was red and wet, and the tape wasn’t sticking because of the fluid.

“We have to stop the bleeding first,” said Victor. “We have to put pressure on the wound.”

“He’s losing air,” said Father.

“He’ll bleed to death if we seal the suit,” said Victor.

A hand grabbed Victor’s arm. It was Toron, looking up at him. “You find my daughter. You keep looking. You make sure I don’t die in vain.”

“You’re not going to die. We’re going to get you back,” said Victor, though he knew it wasn’t true.

Toron tried to smile. “Don’t think so.”

“Put your hand on the wound and hold it there,” Father said to Victor. “I’ll try to seal your hand inside the suit.”

Toron turned his head to Father. “Always trying to fix things, eh, cousin? This one’s even beyond you.” He coughed again, and winced, then gasped from the pain of it. Father held his hand. The pain passed, and when Toron spoke again his voice was strained and weak. “Save the ship. Save Lola and Edimar. Promise me that.”

“I promise,” said Father.

“I was hard on Edimar. I was a bad father.”

“Stop talking,” said Father gently.

Toron winced again.

Father handed Victor the shears. “Cut the grappling arm.”

Victor hesitated. He didn’t want to leave Toron.

“Do it now, Vico,” said Father.

Victor moved, crawling across the surface. He pulled the claw of the heat extractor away. The metal was cracked and brittle. Victor turned on the shears, and the second grappling arm snapped away.

“Don’t stop,” said Father. “Take out one of the needle drills next. No matter what happens, keep going. Break off as much as you can.”

A second figure emerged from the hatch. Father had the other pair of shears in his hand. He rushed the creature, staying low, jabbing the shears forward. Victor reached the drill. It was narrower than the arm. He snapped the claw around it and waited for the heat extractor to do its work, sucking the heat away. Victor glanced to the side and saw Father fighting the creature. Father kept lunging with the shears, but the creature was easily swatting the attacks aside. If Victor didn’t help, the creature would soon get the upper hand.

Victor glanced back at the extractor. It was done. Victor quickly removed the claw and snipped with the shears. The drill snapped free, and Victor pushed it away before glancing again at Father. The creature was off the ship, dangling in space at the end of its hose, not moving, its body mangled from the shears. Father crawled forward and snipped the hose, severing the creature from the ship.

“Are you hurt?” asked Victor.

Father sounded winded. “No. Keep going.”

Victor went to the next drill. Froze it. Snipped it. Pushed it away.

They were approaching El Cavador. Victor could see it far ahead in the distance. Father was at the hatch, looking inside. It was a small hole, too narrow for his shoulders. “There’s another one inside,” he said.

Father reached in with the shears. There was a struggle. Father’s arms jerked right and left. The creature had incredible strength, and for a moment Victor feared that the magnets anchoring Father to the surface of the ship would break their hold and Father would be slung out into space.

But the magnets held, and Father continued to lunged downward, fierce and fast.

Finally the struggling stopped. Father exhaled, coughed, and sounded exhausted. “It’s dead,” he said. He shined a light down into the hole. “I think this is the cockpit. I don’t see any other way to get into this room except through this hatch. No doors. No access points. I think these three were the entire crew.”

Victor crawled toward him. “We have to stop it if we can. Do you see any controls?”

“I see a lot of levers and dials. And a few screens, but they only display images. There’s no data. No writing, no symbols, no instructions, nothing that suggests measurement or coordinates or directions. No language marks or symbols. Nothing. I wouldn’t know how to stop it.”

Victor reached him and looked inside. The creature was snipped in half, floating in the air, limp and oozing liquid. Victor averted his eyes, suddenly hit with a wave of nausea. He shined his light toward the flight console instead, which was a ring around the front window, filled with dozens of levers and switches.

“We need to widen this hole,” said Victor. “I’ll freeze it with the heat extractor. You cut behind me as I move around the circle.” He reached down and pinched the inner ring of the hatch with the claw of the heat extractor then slowly slid the claw along the inner ring. Father followed behind with the shears, cutting and cracking the metal away. They worked quickly, and when they were done, the hole was more than wide enough for the both of them to float inside. Victor pushed the creature aside with the claw of the heat extractor and flew down to the console. The levers varied in size and shape, but there was nothing to indicate their purpose. No markings, words, numbers, nothing. Some of the levers would no doubt be for the drill and grappling arm while others must be for the engines. But which ones? Victor looked around him, searching for clues. The room was large and filled with equipment. There were long tubes of smoky gases and odd-looking plants. The screens showed images of the Milky Way, the solar system, and a slightly blurry image of a planet.

“That’s Earth,” said Father.

Victor thought so, too. “Yet there’s no data,” said Victor. “No labeling, no markings of any kind. Just images. Are you recording all this?”

Father scanned the room. “Trying to.”

Victor focused his attention back on the console, searching for any symbols or markings that might suggest the purpose of any of the levers. It was useless, he realized. There was nothing to guide him.

“Trouble,” said Father, pointing.

Victor followed Father’s finger and looked out the window. The pod was heading toward a large piece of wreckage a kilometer or two ahead.

“We don’t know how to stop it,” said Father. “We need to bail.”

“Give me a second,” said Victor, reaching for one of the levers. He pulled back, and one of the grappling arms extended out in front of them.

“We don’t have time, Vico.”

“We need to save this ship, Father. There might be information here.”

The debris was approaching. The ship would collide in moments. Victor studied the levers. There were three other levers like the one he had tried. Those would all be grappling arms; not what he wanted.

“We need to go now,” said Father.

Victor tried another lever, and the ship accelerated slightly.

“Whoa,” said Father.

Victor pulled back in the other direction, and the ship slowed. But not enough.

“Pull it back more,” said Father.

“That’s as far as it goes.”

They were nearly on top of the debris. It was at least four times the size of the pod, with twisted beams and mangled steel protruding from every direction, all coming clearly into view fast. Father grabbed Victor’s hand. “Move. Now!”

Victor launched up through the hole and crawled out onto the hull. Father came up behind him. The shadow of the debris covered the pod. They were seconds from impact.

“We need to jump,” Father said. “Take off your line.”

Victor fumbled with the D-ring on his safety harness. His fingers slipped. He couldn’t get it lose.

Snip. The shears in Father’s hands cut the line. “Go!”

They launched upward. Victor looked back. The pod crashed into the debris below them. Beams from the debris pierced the cockpit window. Glass shattered and twinkled away into space. The quickship flew forward, spinning awkwardly, still tethered to the pod, and careened into the debris, bending, bouncing off, wrecked. Dust and tiny debris scattered in every direction, clouding the collision.

“El Cavador. El Cavador,” Father was saying. “Do you read? Over.”

The wreckage was getting smaller below them. They were still flying upward with the force and speed of their launch. They weren’t tethered to anything. They had nothing in hand to stop themselves. Father was off to Victor’s right, with the distance growing between them by the second. They had launched at slightly different angles, and now they were drifting farther apart. Unless El Cavador retrieved them immediately, they would fly in these directions at these speeds forever.

“El Cavador,” Father said again. “Can you read?”

There was a crackle over the line, then Concepción’s voice said, “Segundo. We see you. We’re coming for you now.”

Victor looked back and saw El Cavador emerge from behind a section of debris.

“Get Vico first,” said Father.

“We’re getting you both,” said Concepción.

Victor turned his head back to Father, who was a great distance away now, getting smaller by the moment.

“Toron didn’t make it,” said Father.

“We know,” said Concepción.

The ship moved closer, pulling up beside him. A miner with a lifeline leaped out from the ship and wrapped his arms around Victor’s chest, stopping Victor’s flight. It was Bahzím.

“Got you, Vico.”

Victor clung to him as Bahzím thumbed his propulsion pack and turned them both back toward El Cavador. Down the side of the ship, a distance away, another of the miners was grabbing Father as well. Victor watched until he was certain Father was secured, then he turned his head and looked back at the wreckage now far below, where Toron was lost among the dust and debris.

CHAPTER 15

Warnings

Victor gathered with the Council in the fuge two days later after a search for more survivors proved unsuccessful. He had hoped to accompany the search party to look for Janda, but Concepción had asked him and Father to comb through the wreckage for salvageable parts instead. It was a long shot, but if Victor and Father could find enough parts to build a laserline transmitter, they could restore the ship’s long-range communication. Father had said that finding what they needed would be like finding needles in a haystack that had been ripped to shreds and strewn across a county mile, but he agreed to look nonetheless. When he and Victor came up empty-handed, Concepción convened the Council meeting.

The nine Italian survivors who had been trapped in the wreckage were in attendance. They stood huddled together off to one side, the horror of their ordeal still evident on their faces. None of them had been terribly injured in the pod attack, but they looked like broken people nonetheless. Weeks ago, when the Italians had docked with El Cavador, the Italians had been full of song and laughter and life. Now they were like ghosts of the people they had been, silent and solemn and heavy of heart. For the past two days they had patiently awaited the return of the search party, desperate for news of lost loved ones. But both days had ended in disappointment, and now whatever hope they clung to had to be paper thin.

“I’m ending the search for survivors,” said Concepción.

Jeppe, an elderly Italian who had become a spokesman for the survivors, objected. “There have to be places we haven’t searched,” he said.

“There aren’t,” said Concepción. “As painful as I know this must be, we all must accept facts and move forward.”

“What about the bodies?” asked Jeppe. “We can’t leave them out there.”

“We can and we will,” said Concepción. “The recovery effort could take weeks to conduct safely, and we’ve stayed here too long already. Under other circumstances I would agree, but these are not normal circumstances. We need to move now. I remind you that there are three members of my own family among the dead who have not been recovered. All of us are making sacrifices.”

She meant Toron, Faron, and Janda. The miners never found Janda’s body in their searches, and now that the search was over, no one ever would. Victor felt a pang of guilt as he pictured Toron in his mind, dying there on the pod, pleading for Victor to find his daughter.

Concepción continued. “Our primary mission now is to warn Earth and Luna and everyone in the Belts that this near-lightspeed ship is coming. The pod is incontrovertible evidence that the ship is alien and that the species flying it has malicious intent. If we had a laserline transmitter, we could send a warning immediately, but at the moment, we have no reliable long-range communication. The radio is working, but without a laserline, I doubt we’ll send a message at this distance with any accuracy. I suggest we set a course for Weigh Station Four and try to hail them as we approach. We can then use their laserline transmitter to send a warning from there.”