The Swarm (39 page)

“Thank you,” said Mazer.

The elevator doors opened. Mazer and Prem stepped inside. The doors closed, and the elevator began to descend.

“I hope you know what you're doing,” said Prem.

“I don't,” said Mazer. “I'm improvising.”

 

CHAPTER 18

Tunnels

Ansible transmission between the Hegemon and Polemarch,
Office of the Hegemony Sealed Archives, Imbrium, Luna, 2118

UKKO:
   You ordered a free-miner ship carrying women and children into a possible combat environment. Do you have any idea how utterly asinine that was?

KETKAR:
   Since you have never held military command and you obviously do not grasp the immediacy of our situation, I don't expect you to understand.

UKKO:
   Victor Delgado is a hero on Earth from the first war. As is Imala Bootstamp. As is Edimar Querales. Getting them slaughtered would not endear the free citizens of Earth to our cause.

KETKAR:
   You and I used to be allies, if you recall.

UKKO:
   That was before I found out you were a political idiot.

KETKAR:
   This struggle transcends politics.

UKKO:
   Your reckless action might raise such public outrage that the national governments demand a complete change of the IF's high command as a condition of continued financial support of the Hegemony. Nothing ever “transcends” politics.

Inside the Formic cocoon, Victor tapped his thumb trigger and released a few bursts of air out of his propulsion pack to push himself down toward the surface of the rock. He moved for the tunnel where he had seen the creature, a small grublike animal no bigger than his head. Slowly, hesitantly, Victor approached, worried that an arm or tentacle might shoot out of one of the smaller tunnels and pull him down. He reached back and grabbed the spear Magoosa had made him, pulling it up over his shoulder so it was free in his hands.

When he was still a meter away from the tunnel he positioned himself directly over it and shined his light inside. The creature was nowhere in sight. The tunnel wasn't completely empty however. There was a cluster of small pellets stacked neatly near the entrance.

“Are you getting this, Imala?”

“What is that?”

“It looks like worm droppings.”

He got closer. The pellets were stacked on one side of the tunnel, three pellets high, held in place by a thin mucus covering that prevented them from floating off in zero G. Victor reached in and picked up one of the pellets in his gloved hand. He pinched the pellet, but it didn't give. “They're not droppings, Imala. This is hard as metal. In fact, I think it is metal.”

“Metal? How?”

“I don't know, but I'm going to take a few samples.” He removed a small canister from his hip pouch and filled it with several pellets. The metal looked pure and unpolluted. No trace minerals. No imperfections. The Formics were mining, he realized. They were digging through the tunnels and gathering metal. But how were they processing it? How were they purifying it? And for that matter how were they digging? There weren't any machines that he could see set up on the surface. He shined his light around him, looking in all directions across the surface, and there was nothing. No lasers, no drills, no mechanism for making the holes.

He moved to another tunnel and found the same organized pattern of pellet stacks. The stacks were each three pellets high and roughly a hundred pellets long and wide. They were stacked along one wall, every half meter or so, equidistant from each other, all covered in just enough mucus to hold them in place. Victor shined his light down into the tunnel. This one continued straight down like a well. The pellet stacks continued as far as his light would extend. He reached in and pulled the nearest stack toward him to see how easily it would be to harvest them. The pellets came off the wall with little to no effort. They scattered all around him and floated away, small groups of pellets still clinging together by the mucus.

“What does this mean, Vico?” Imala asked.

Victor moved to the next tunnel. More stacks of pellets extended downward. He lifted his head and took in his surroundings, scanning the surface of the asteroid. There were hundreds of these narrow tunnels filled with pellets. Thousands. “I don't know, Imala. The Formics are mining metal, but I can't see how or why.”

He moved on, releasing gentle bursts of air to push his way forward. He stopped at another tunnel where the pellets were slightly larger and of a slightly different color.

“Looks like a different metal,” Imala asked.

“That's my guess,” said Victor. He got a different canister from his pouch and gathered a few more samples. A short distance later, he found stacks of a third metal, and then a fourth. He took samples of those as well and moved on. How long had the Formics been here, he wondered. There were so many tunnels. And yet the ship they had come on was small, able to hold only a few crewmembers. Five at the most. How had such a small crew completed so much excavation?

He reached a tunnel large enough for him to crawl inside, though only barely. He paused at the entrance and explored the interior with his wrist light.

“You can't go in,” Imala said, as if reading his thoughts. “There's not enough room. You won't be able to turn around. And you don't know where it leads. It might narrow suddenly, and then you're stuck. We've got what we came for, Vico. Come back out, and we'll take the samples and have them tested. That's more than enough to keep the Polemarch happy.”

Something sparkled in the tunnel ahead of him, reflecting his light. One of the pellet stacks on the tunnel wall five meters in. “Do you see that, Imala?”

“Leave it, Vico. Cut yourself an extraction hole through the resin, and I'll come pick you up. We were asked to reconnoiter, and we've reconnoitered.”

“I want a sample of that as well, whatever it is. It might be important.”

He draped the spear over his back again and pulled himself into the tunnel. It was a tight squeeze. He had a little bit of room on all sides, but not much. He kept drifting into the walls as he pulled himself forward, his feet and armor scraping on the rock. He was glad then that he had covered everything with a tough fabric as Magoosa had suggested, removing any possibility of a spark.

He reached the pellets and was surprised to see that they were transparent. He picked one up and squeezed. It cracked between his fingertips.

“It's ice, Imala. Pellets of pure ice. How? That doesn't make sense. This asteroid is supposed to be covered in ice, and yet the only ice I find is in pellets on the wall.”

Movement above his head caused him to cry out and try to scramble back. He slammed back into the wall and banged around a bit until he realized he couldn't get out of such a small space quickly. He stopped and steadied himself. The movement was made by a small sluglike creature. It was right by Victor's helmet, but it ignored him completely. It didn't even seem bothered by his lights. The creature slithered across the wall, where there was a thick track of mucus that Victor hadn't noticed. It approached the stack of ice pellets, opened a hole in itself and defecated three pellets of ice covered with the same mucus substance. The ice pellets assumed their place in the perfectly organized stack, and then, without pausing in its labor, the slug moved away in the direction it had come.

Victor tracked it with his light. The slug was oblivious. It reached a hole in the wall, barely bigger than itself and wiggled inside. Victor crawled forward to investigate. The creature had stopped less than a meter in the hole, but Victor couldn't see what was beyond it. The creature was still for a minute, then two. Then, as if put in reverse, the slug wiggled its way back out and then once again toward the ice pellets. Victor shined a light into the hole and found a slab of milky ice blocking the path.

“It's eating and harvesting ice,” said Imala.

“Not just harvesting it, Imala. It's cleansing the ice. It's removing all the particulates and impurities. Look how dirty the ice is in the tunnel and how pristine the pellets are in the stack. It's a water-filtration system, Imala. It's a biological water-filtration system. The slug ingests the dirty ice, cleanses it somehow, purifies it, and then deposits pure ice in the stack.”

“How is that possible?” said Imala. “It can't take impurities out of the ice. Ice is a solid. It can't be strained in that state.”

“That's what it's doing,” said Victor. “Maybe it melts the dirty ice inside itself somehow, separates the impurities from the water, and then refreezes the water and discards the impurities.”

“An animal with the ability to internally freeze a liquid?” said Imala.

And yet there was no other explanation. How else could the creatures have removed any impurities? He drew closer to the mucous track on the wall, and he could see small particles and detritus in the sticky substance. So the slug was discarding the impurities as it made its way to the stacks, spreading them out, excreting them from underneath perhaps. Victor looked around him. There seemed to be tracks of discarded particles everywhere in the tunnel, all along the walls. He just hadn't noticed them before. They were not scattered evenly across the surface, but in wide lines that twisted and turned and snaked their way down the tunnel. It was as if the slugs, over time, had created highways of discarded particles as they moved up and down the tracks, shedding impurities in the mucus as they went. And then, after a period, they had abandoned that trail and started another one, perhaps when the discarded impurities made the mucus so thick in the first trail that it had become difficult to navigate.

So the slugs had moved on to create another track, and the old mucous trail had dried up. The particles in the old trail settled against the wall with the drying mucus to form a sort of thin mortar.

Victor rubbed his finger across one of the dried mucous tracks, but far fewer particles flaked free and drifted away then he had expected. The residue was surprisingly strong.

He followed one of the mortar lines with his light. It twisted and turned in what seemed to be a random pattern, snaking down, deeper into the tunnel.

“It doesn't make sense, Imala. You see these trails of sediment the slugs leave behind? They twist every which way randomly. That doesn't sync with the ordered manner in which they operate and deposit these pellets. The pellets are stacked so evenly and yet their highways are as jagged as the cracks in the rock.”

And therein was the answer, he realized. The tracks moved every which way like cracks in the rock, because they were
covering
cracks in the rock. The sediment residue felt as hard as mortar because it
was
mortar. The lines weren't random. They were intentional. The slugs were sealers. They purified ice, yes, but they had another mission as well. They patched up cracks in the rock. All of this digging, all of these tunnels so close together would naturally weaken the integrity of the asteroid. You can only drill so many holes through a rock before the rock crumbles and breaks apart. This little bug and others like him were keeping the asteroid together.

A hand grabbed Victor's ankle and yanked him back toward the tunnel entrance. He cried out, his helmet and arms banging against the wall of the tunnel.

“Vico!”

Imala's voice in his helmet. Panicked. Victor couldn't see anything. The space was too confined. Whatever had him, had him tight. Victor tried kicking with his free foot as the creature dragged him out, but as soon as he did, another hand gripped the free foot and held it firm. The tunnel walls around him were a blur, and then suddenly he was out of the tunnel, yanked free and arcing upward and around, held by his ankles as if on a pendulum, unable to stop himself.

He crashed into the surface of the asteroid on his side, hitting the rock so hard it left him momentarily dazed. His body was limp, and he began to bounce upward and away from the surface when something landed on top of him and pinned him down, strong hands clutching at rock. A Formic. With a rock in its hand. Victor tried to rotate onto his back and lift an arm to block the blow when the rock struck him in the side of the helmet. A powerful blow. With inhuman strength behind it. His face slammed into the internal wall of the helmet. His right camera feed flickered out, the external camera broken. Half of his view projected inside his helmet was gone. It was like losing an eye. Only his left view remained. He turned his head and saw the Formic bringing the rock down again. It hit Victor's helmet so hard that for a microsecond Victor was sure it had broken through. But no, the armor held.

Another blow.

And another.

He couldn't wiggle free. He couldn't protect his head. I'm going to die, he thought. It's going to beat me to death.

He could no longer hear Imala. His radio was out, busted or jostled or disconnected.

Another blow. His left camera feed flickered, threatened to go. He couldn't lose that, too. He'd be blind.

The Formic raised the rock again. Victor tapped the side of his hand, and the ice crampon that he had imbedded in the gauntlet snapped out like a blade. He swung his arm in hard and sunk the crampon into the side of the Formic just as the rock connected with his helmet again.

Several things happened at once. The Formic's tight grip on him relaxed as the creature buckled and retreated, the crampon blade coming free in a sticky muscle-tearing motion as the Formic fell away. Victor's left camera feed winked out, broken, leaving him blind. A hiss of air followed. An alarm. Victor reached up, felt his helmet. The seal at the bottom of the helmet where it locked with the shoulders was broken, bent inward from one of the blows. Air was escaping. Leaking oxygen. His helmet was broken.

A heavy blunt object struck him in the side of the helmet, knocking him away from the surface. Pain exploded from the side of his head as his head struck the interior of his helmet. His suit alarm wailed. His interface flashed a warning:
OXYGEN LEAK. LIFE THREATENING
. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He was drifting away blind.