The Swarm (9 page)

I have a few concerns, mostly centered on how the marines will get into and out of your tunnel cart. I scribbled a few notes on the model (see attachment). Basically, the shoulder and crotch straps seem secure, but is there another system that would allow the marine to detach himself faster? What you have works, but in a combat situation, it could prove to be a death trap. A marine may need to abandon the cart in a hurry to assume a defensive position or to maneuver through a difficult opening. A quick-release latch perhaps. Something to allow instant mobility outside the ordinary Formic interior tunnel system.

Or another thought: Could your cart be changed to a kind of harness a marine could wear that would maintain his position in the middle of the tunnel and allow low-friction movement, as your cart does? Perhaps using extensions that reach above and below him? I foresee difficulties in maintaining balance, but you're the only human engineer with real experience, both in zero G and in moving around inside a Formic ship. Give it some thought, anyway. If the tunnel cart really is the only possible design, so be it.

My CO has ordered me not to publish any more designs even on the secure IF nets, so for now I am unable to share this with others. Also I will likely be leaving WAMRED to face a court-martial. Long story. Suffice it to say, problems persist.

But fret not. Once you're finished, we'll find another way to get this into the hands of marines. Even if I'm no longer with the International Fleet. We both know there are back channels that can get an essential design past the red tape and into production.

Old Soldier

—
Mazer Rackham: Selected Correspondence,
International Fleet Archives, CentCom, Luna

Victor opened the hatch to the ship's engine room, and black smoke billowed out into his face, stinging his eyes and filling his nostrils with hot acrid fumes. He coughed into the crook of his arm and pulled a bandana from his pocket to shield his mouth and nose. The flashing alert on his wrist pad informed him that the fire inside the engine room had been extinguished. The foam pellets he had installed last year had done their duty well, inflating and popping and smothering the flames with white, sticky extinguishing foam.

Victor felt some relief at that news, but he was hardly at ease now. How far were they from the nearest depot? Four months? Five? If the fire or smoke had damaged life support, the family could be in serious trouble.

Magoosa flew up beside him and caught a handhold to stop himself, his eyes wide with panic. “Fire?”

Victor kept his voice calm. Magoosa was a good apprentice, but to frighten the Somali boy might lead to mistakes. “The fire is out, Goos. But we need to act quickly to ventilate the engine room. Fly around to the other side and open the far hatch to let the smoke out.”

“But smoke will get in the corridor.”

“Better here than in the engine room where the smoke will gum up the systems. Now go.”

Magoosa nodded then launched down the side corridor, coughing as he went.

Victor lowered his goggles over his eyes, called up the ship's main computer on his HUD, and blinked a few commands to turn on the ventilators inside the engine room. Then he sealed off this corridor before the smoke dissipated throughout the ship. Smoke, he knew, was a slow assassin. It would snake its way into circuits and components and leave a black tacky residue that collected dust and gunk over time. Eventually that would cause the processors to overheat, which would lead to all kinds of breakdowns.

Victor took a deep breath and pulled his body up through the hatch and into the smoke.

The engine room was centrally located on the ship, with two main corridors wrapping around it on either side. All of the ship's life-support systems were housed here: oxygen generation, HVAC, water purification—all of it stacked on top of each other with narrow gaps between each large piece of hardware. Moving from one end of the room to the other required a bit of acrobatic maneuvering, twisting and bending the body through zero G, like a snake wiggling its way through a three-dimensional maze.

Bad design, as far as Victor was concerned. Positioning all the life-support systems in the center of the ship protected them from collision threats, but putting them all together had dangerous drawbacks as well. If one caught fire they could all go up. And out here in the Kuiper Belt, where free-miner families were so far apart that rescue was rarely an option, even a small fire could be catastrophic.

I should have rearranged all this when I had the chance, Victor thought.

When he had joined the crew two years ago, he had brought with him all the tools and equipment necessary to convert the Gagak from a salvage ship into an asteroid mining vessel. Drills, suits, saws, quickships. All new tech, all top grade. The conversion hadn't been easy. A salvage ship was basically a thin-hulled box with a propulsion system—light and fast and easily maneuverable. A mining ship was the opposite: thick and indestructible so it could withstand the torque and abuse the heavy equipment would inflict when the ship anchored to an asteroid and dug out a mine.

For the Gagak, that meant reinforcing existing beams, building new ones, adding new trusses, welding more shield plates to the hull—doing everything possible to strengthen the ship's structural integrity. Essentially rebuilding the vessel from the inside out. Victor had wanted to rearrange the life-support systems at that time and spread them around the ship. But Arjuna—the Somali captain and Magoosa's father—had resisted the idea, not wanting to risk damaging equipment by moving it.

Victor hadn't pushed the issue. He was the newcomer at the time, the outsider. He was already changing the family's livelihood by converting their ship and pushing them out into the Kuiper Belt. How much more demanding could he be? It was Arjuna's ship, not Victor's. So he had remained cooperative and compromising and dropped the issue. That had been a mistake.

Victor grabbed a pipe and pulled himself forward, relieved that the pipe was not hot to the touch. That was a good sign. The heat from the fire hadn't reached this far. That gave him a flicker of hope.

That hope faded as soon as he reached the center of the room where the fire had obviously started. It was the oxygen extractor. The metal casing around it was hot and streaked with scorch marks, its paint charred and bubbly at the edges.

Victor removed the anchor screws and pulled the casing free, exposing the oxygen extractor's inner components. The harsh scent of burned plastic and fried components almost made him gag.

“Can you fix it?” Magoosa asked. He had arrived to Victor's left, covering his mouth with an emergency oxygen mask.

“The main processor is melted,” said Victor. “So is all the wiring. It's fried.” He touched one of the boards with the tip of his screwdriver, and the piece folded inward, the plastic now gooey and pliable. “Besides, everything's covered in foam. There's no salvaging this.”

“But you can fix it, right?” said Magoosa. “That's the oxygen extractor. If we don't have that, we don't breathe.”

“We have several months of reserve oxygen in the tanks,” Victor said. “We'll rely on that for now while we scrounge up some replacement parts.”

“Replacements from where?” said Magoosa. “We're months away from the nearest depot.”

“We'll make the parts,” said Victor.

Shipbuilders knew that crews would have breakdowns, so the engineers had standardized a lot of the original parts. The processor from the washing machine might be similar or even identical to the processor here. Victor would simply have to remove it from the washing machine, make a mold, and print a duplicate.

“So we
can
fix it,” Magoosa said.

“Probably,” said Victor. “Maybe. Right now our priority is to get rid of the smoke. Let's pull the air purifiers from the workshop and set them up in the corridor. Then we'll come back in here with the vacs and clean out the air vents.”

They left the engine room and found a crowd of people gathered in the corridor, where the smoke had thinned into a thin murky haze. Everyone coughed and shouted questions at once.

“Quiet!” a voice said over the din. “Give the man some room.”

The crowd turned and saw that Arjuna, the captain, had arrived from the helm and was hovering at the other end of the corridor. Arjuna was a physically imposing sight. Most of the Somali crewmen were thin and waiflike, but Arjuna was wide in the chest and arms, with a voice that demanded obedience. “This corridor needs to be ventilated. Get the children out of here.”

Several children were watching from behind the bulkheads. Some were from Victor's Venezuelan family, but most were children of the Somali crew.

The crowd moved away, shooing the children toward the far hatch. Magoosa left to fetch the air purifiers, and eventually Victor and Arjuna were alone.

“What happened?” asked Arjuna.

Victor told him about the fire. “I may be able to fix the OE if I can find and make the right parts. I'm not sure yet.”

“You need to be sure, Vico. Because there are only two options here. We either stay the course toward the asteroid and count on you to fix this, or we change course now, make for a depot, and pray that our oxygen reserves get us there.”

“I haven't done the calculations,” said Victor, “but if we have enough surplus oxygen in the reserve tanks to give us a little leeway, I'd ask that you let me try to fix this before we decide. We'd use a lot fuel decelerating and changing course, which means once we reached the depot, we'd have to
buy
fuel to replace what we've used. That could be as much as a quarter of our yearly income. But if we can reach the asteroid, we can extract the fuel from the ice for free once we separate the hydrogen and oxygen.”

“I'm aware of the economics, Vico. My concern is the safety of this crew. There are nearly one hundred people on this ship, forty-three of whom are children. If we all asphyxiate for lack of oxygen, it won't matter how much money we've saved or earned. Likewise, if we reach the asteroid with a broken oxygen extractor, it won't matter how much ice we harvest since we won't be able to use it.”

“I'll fix the OE,” said Victor.

“You're sure?”

“Seventy percent sure. I won't know for certain until I get in there and try to rebuild it. Give me forty-eight hours. If I can't fix everything by then, we head for the depot.”

Arjuna glanced toward the engine room. “I should have let you spread the life-support systems around the ship.” He shook his head and sighed. “First Copernicus. Now this.”

Victor shrugged. “This is an old ship. Pieces break down.”

“We should have stayed in the Asteroid Belt and stuck with salvage,” said Arjuna. “We were fine working salvage. I understood salvage. We had contacts, buyers, a system that worked. Now we're out here in a frozen wasteland, chipping away at ice and rock and getting ourselves killed.”

“Let Magoosa and me fix this,” said Victor. “I'll text you hourly updates.”

Arjuna nodded then launched back down the corridor toward the helm.

Magoosa soon returned with the air purifiers, and Victor helped him set them up in the corridors. Then they cleaned the engine room with the minivacs.

“You think the Formics ever have problems like this?” Magoosa asked. “Fires and breakdowns and crazy repairs?”

“Probably,” said Victor. “But much of their tech is mechanical. There's less electrical work, so less chance of fire.”

“You think a Formic fighter would ever come after us?”

“Doubt it,” said Victor. “There's no reason for Formics to come to this sector. There aren't any military targets out here. It's just a bunch of icy rocks. This is probably one of the safest places in the system. That's why your dad agreed to come out here. We're nowhere near the Formic fleet's current trajectory. If they come straight into system like the Formic scout ship did in the first war, they'll be far away from here and pass us by. The IF will confront them in the Asteroid Belt and annihilate them.”

“Do you believe that?” Magoosa asked. “That we'll win?”

“We won last time,” Victor said. If you can call forty million people dead and all of southeast China burned to a crisp a victory, he thought.

“This time will be different,” said Magoosa. “We took on a single ship in the first war. This time we'll be taking on ten or more.”

“It's going to be a challenge,” Victor agreed. “But we have to believe in the IF or life gets rather hopeless.”

“Are you going to enlist?” Magoosa asked.

“I'm not a soldier, Goos. I'm a mechanic.”

“The IF needs mechanics. They need everyone. There's a list on the nets of hundreds of jobs they hope to fill. Thousands maybe.”

“They also need free miners to supply them with harvested iron and precious metals. We're doing our part right where we are.”

Magoosa furrowed his brow. “But you fought in the first war. You practically
won
the first war. How can you turn your back on the IF now?”

“I'm not turning my back on anyone. I was never
in
the IF, Goos. I was just thrown in with a group of soldiers. Imala and I happened to be where we were needed, and we helped as best as we could. There was nothing more to it than that.”

“It was more than that. Imala has told me stories. You helped create some of the tech that won us the war.”

“Calling it tech is a little generous. We were throwing stuff together, doing the best we could with what we had available. No different than what you and I are doing right now.”

“I see you sketching on your wrist pad sometimes. I see you drawing up ideas for tech. That's for the IF, right?”

“They're sketches, Goos. That's it. The IF has real engineers for that sort of thing. I'm just tinkering around.”