Earth Unaware (First Formic War) (51 page)

He realized then that there was no one on the ship he could trust. In fact, as long as he worked for Father, he could never trust anyone else under Father’s employ. Father would go to any length and use any person to keep Lem under his control. Ah, Father. Such irony. You probably actually think you’re being a loving, protective parent.

Lem looked at his reflection in the glass and straightened his jacket.

This is war, Father. I will never be free of you as long as you own this company and I am under your employ. I am done playing your little life lessons. It’s time I taught you a few of my own.

CHAPTER 24

Data Cube

By now, Victor was convinced that everyone in the rehabilitation center thought he was insane. The nurses and orderlies all treated him kindly, but the moment he started talking about hormigas and aliens and the interference in space, they all put on that false smile that said, “Yes, yes. I’m listening to every word you say, Vico, and I
believe
you.” Which was a lie. If they believed him, they would
do
something. They would give him back his belongings and send him to someone who could help: a government official, the press, the military, anyone who would take him seriously and help him get a warning to Earth. Instead, the staff all nodded and smiled and treated him like a head case as they wheeled him to his various physical therapy sessions and shot him with meds that were supposed to help rebuild muscle mass.

So when they told him someone from the Lunar Trade Department was coming to speak with him about his case, Victor allowed himself to hope. Finally. Someone with some authority who can actually help.

Then they wheeled him into the room where the woman was waiting, and all of Victor’s hope went right out the window. She was way too young. Not much older than him, probably. Either an intern or barely out of college. A nobody in the professional sense.

“Hello, Victor. I’m Imala Bootstamp.”

“Who’s your boss?” Victor asked.

The question caught her off guard. “My boss?”

“The person you report to. Your superior. It’s a simple question.”

“Why is that relevant?”

“It’s absolutely relevant because that is the person I need to be talking to. Actually, I need to be speaking to your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. But since you probably don’t have access to that person, I’ll start with your boss and we’ll work our way up.”

She smiled, sat back in her chair, and looked around her. “This seems like a nice facility. They’re taking good care of you?”

“The bed is comfortable, but I’m a prisoner. The two kind of cancel each other out.”

She nodded. “Seems clean at least.”

They were sitting alone in a stark white room with a glass wall and ceiling, affording them a view of the city and the ship traffic high overhead.

“Haven’t you been here before?” asked Victor “You work with the LTD. You’re a caseworker. All injured immigrants come here. Are you telling me you’ve never actually done this job before?”

“Let’s say I’m new,” she said.

He could tell he was annoying her. He didn’t care.

“Incidentally,” Victor said, “do you actually know who your boss is? Because you seemed rather unsure when I asked a second ago.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the one asking the questions.”

“Are you unsure of that, too?”

She forced a smile. “All right, Victor. If we’re going to be perfectly honest with each other, no, I don’t know who my boss is. I got this assignment about twenty minutes ago from someone who doesn’t even work in Customs. So he’s technically not my boss. I haven’t even been to the Customs offices yet. I came directly here from my previous job. So I don’t even have a computer terminal or a desk or a mail account yet. If the door was locked, I couldn’t get in the building because I don’t yet have an access ring. Fair enough? That’s my résumé.”

“Wow,” said Victor. “I can’t tell you how much confidence that instills in me to know that my assigned caseworker, the person responsible for getting me out of here, is so deeply experienced in the field. Boy am I going to sleep well tonight.”

“You’re welcome to file an appeal and request a new caseworker, but you should know that there’s a three-week turnaround. Don’t expect a new person to walk in here tomorrow.”

He leaned forward. “Look, Ms. Bootstamp—”

“Call me Imala.”

“Fine. Imala. I’m sure you’re a nice person. And I’m not normally a jerk, but you are not the answer to my problem. You are so far removed from the answer to my problem that you and I shouldn’t even be talking. I wish you well in your new job, but the best way for you to help me is to find out who your boss is and to bring me that person. Make sense?”

She was quiet a moment. Then she smiled again. “You broke the law, Victor. Maybe that hasn’t been explained to you clearly enough, but you entered lunar gravity in a manned spacecraft without clearance or authorization. A rather serious offense. You also illegally disrupted a government flight-control frequency. Another serious offense.”

“I didn’t know it was a restricted frequency. I was trying to—”

“I’m not finished,” she said. “You also have no passport, no birth certificate, no proof of identity, no right whatsoever to be on this moon. You may have broken these laws in ignorance, but the law doesn’t care. My job is to review the law with you and hear your case to see if your situation warrants legal leniency based on extenuating circumstances beyond your control. These are defined as potential loss of life and potential property damage of a ‘significant’ value. You may not like the fact that I’m new and inexperienced. But I am the person assigned to your case. This is my job and I’m going to do it. Now, you obviously think I’m stupid. And apparently you have no social skills because you’re unable to
conceal
the fact that you think I’m stupid. But here’s the thing, I’m not actually stupid. I know how this world works. You don’t. I know trade and customs law. You don’t. I know what’s necessary to get you freed. You don’t. So you can make demands until you’re purple in the face, but you will never see anyone above me until I say so. And right now I don’t say so. As far as I’m concerned, you have two options: You can submit to my questions and possibly let me help you. Or you can sit in your room until your grace period expires and the judge plops you on a shuttle back to wherever it was you came from. Your choice. When I come back tomorrow, you can give me your answer.”

She got up. And without waiting for him to respond, she was out the door and gone.

Great, thought Victor. It’s not enough that I have a nobody. She has to be a snooty nobody. He sighed. He wasn’t helping the situation. And now another precious day was wasted.

He was waiting for her the following day in the same room.

“I obviously can’t go above you without going through you,” said Victor. “So let’s do this your way. And let me preface this by saying, everything I am about to tell you can be proven. I have evidence. It’s all on my data cube, which the staff locked away with all my other belongings when I got here. Should you want more evidence, I can tell you exactly where to look to verify its veracity for yourself. Fair enough?”

“Works for me,” said Imala.

“You’ve heard about the interference in space scrambling all transmissions?”

“Every day on the news.”

“Well, I know what’s causing that interference. And if you can get my data cube, I’ll show you.”

She was gone for ten minutes. When she returned she had a clear bag with all of Victor’s personal items. He took out the data cube, placed it on the table, and turned it on, creating a holospace in the air above it.

“The interference is being caused by a near-lightspeed alien starship on a direct course to Earth.”

“An alien ship?”

“That’s right.”

“Coming to Earth?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I see.”

“I know that sounds insane to you. I know you think
I’m
insane. But my family put me on a quickship from the Kuiper Belt. Eight billion klicks from here. I was on that ship for nearly eight months. There was a very good chance that I wouldn’t make it to Luna alive. And if you know anything about free-miner families, you know we simply don’t do that. We protect our own. Family first. And if you
don’t
know anything about free miners, then why do you have this job?”

“I didn’t say you were insane.”

“You didn’t have to. It was written all over your face. And frankly I can’t afford that. I need you to have an open mind and look at this evidence without having dismissed it beforehand. I don’t care what you think of me. I only care that the information I have gets to everyone on Luna and Earth. That won’t happen if we do this with you trying to disprove it.”

“I told you I would listen, Victor.”

“Listening isn’t enough. You need to have an open mind. If you play bureaucrat and worry about how this will affect your standing with that new boss of yours, you’ll only find excuses to bury it.”

“Remember, I’m not stupid,” said Imala. “I will keep an open mind. You’re simply going to have to trust me.”

He didn’t want to trust her. He wanted to trust the person five or six steps up the org chart, but what choice did he have.

He showed her everything: the charts, the trajectory, wreckage from the Italians, video of him and Father and Toron attacking the pod, the hormigas fiercely fighting back, Toron’s death, interviews with the surviving Italians recounting the pod attacking their ships. There was even footage of Victor modifying the quickship and launching it toward Luna. It took nearly two hours to go over it all, and Imala sat in silence the whole time. When Victor finished, Imala remained quiet for a few moments.

“Play back the part where we see the aliens,” she said.

Victor found the spot and played it.

“Stop right there,” said Imala.

Victor freeze-framed on the hormiga’s face.

Imala stared at it for a full two minutes. Finally she looked at Victor. “Is this a hoax?”

“Yes, it’s big elaborate hoax, Imala. I went out and invented a near-lightspeed ship just so I could prank you.”

“I’m asking, Victor, because it looks completely real to me. Not just the alien, but everything. All the data. The math. The sky scans. It looks authentic, and I believe it.”

“You do?”

“Completely. But if this
is
a hoax then you need to tell me now because I am prepared to help you as much as I can. And if I help you, and this turns out not to be real, I will lose my job, and you and I will go to prison for a very long time.”

“It’s real. If you can get access to a scope powerful enough to see out to that far, you can see it for yourself.”

She shook her head. “That will take too long. The only scopes that powerful on Luna belong to Ukko Jukes. And believe me, he won’t help us.”

“So you’ll take this to your boss?”

“Of course I’ll take it to my boss. I have to. That’s my job. But not the original data cube. I want that to stay with you. I’ll take a copy. Today. Right after I leave here. But that can’t be
all
we do, Victor. I’m not putting the fate of the world into the hands of a few bureaucrats in Lunar Customs. I don’t know those people, and even if I did I wouldn’t trust them with something like this. Sad recent experiences have taught me never to trust the people above me. So we’ll follow the proper channels, yes. We’ll start the ball rolling that way. But we also do our own thing. We get the word out our way. Now. Immediately.”

“How? We go to the press?”

“No. Not fast enough. The world isn’t watching the Lunar news. I mean right now, Victor. We upload this video of the alien onto the nets. Right now. We get people all over the world watching this video within the hour.”

“How do we do that?”

She took her holopad from her pouch, set it on the table, and copied the video from Victor’s data cube to her own holospace. Using her stylus, she selected a section of video featuring the alien attacking Victor and his Father and Toron on the pod and set it aside. Then she selected other bits of video to follow. The interior of the Formic pod. The wreckage of the Italian ships. Select, frightening accounts from the Italian survivors. She then created several frames with additional information, including coordinates, trajectory, and other data from Edimar. When she finished, she played it back. It was just over five minutes long.

“We can’t make it too long,” she said. “Or people won’t watch it.”

“It’s good,” said Victor. “It’s just the right length.”

She was moving her stylus in the holospace, bringing up several different windows. “There are about twenty major sites we can upload this to. They all get a lot of traffic. Other sites will see it and pick it up. It’ll go viral.”

“How quickly?”

“No telling. My guess is very fast. Once it gets momentum, it will explode. You want to tell the whole world aliens are coming? Here’s your chance.” She handed him the stylus. The windows in the holospace were all selected. Twenty vid sites on the nets. A large green button in the center of the holo was marked “send.” All he had to do was touch it.

He thought of Father and Mother and Concepción and Mono and everyone back on El Cavador praying for him to reach this moment. This is what he had come for and nearly died for. This is what Toron
had
died for. He thought of Janda. He thought of her hand atop his, holding the stylus, too. He thought of the twelve billion people on Earth who were in for the wake-up call of their lives.

“This better work,” said Victor. Then he reached out and pushed the button.

AFTERWORD

The story in this novel didn’t begin as a novel. It began as backstory to
Ender’s Game,
which was first published as a novelette in August 1977, and then later as a full-length novel in 1985. Backstory, by its definition, is everything that happened in the world of the story before the story begins. It’s easy to ignore backstory. It’s in the past, after all. Yet in the case of
Ender’s Game,
I’d argue that without the richly imaginative history that Scott Card gave his universe, the premise of
Ender’s Game
would have failed.