Earth Afire (The First Formic War) Read online

She pulled her legs off his lap. “Can you request that someone else go in your place? I know that’s unorthodox, but surely they make exceptions.”

  “I don’t have extenuating circumstances.”

  “Tell them I need you here to help with the development of the Med-Assist.”

  “You’ve never needed my help before, and the military doesn’t make exceptions, especially with private contractors. If you needed a soldier, they would argue that it doesn’t have to be me.”

  She got up, crossed to the window, and looked out over the city. “Don’t you want to fight this?”

  “You know I can’t, Kim.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Do I want to go to China? Of course not. But I don’t get a say in these matters. That’s the problem. It’s always going to be like this. They’re always going to send me away.”

  She turned and faced him. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying this is a moment of decision. I know we’ve never discussed marriage, but you and I both know that’s where this relationship is headed. We dance around the word, but we’re both thinking about it.”

  “Of course I think about it,” she said. “That’s what people our age do, Mazer. They look for someone with whom to spend the rest of their life.”

  “And is this the kind of marriage you want?” Mazer asked. “Do you want a husband who goes off for six months or years at a time? Is that the kind of father you want for your children? One who’s absent most of the time? People don’t get married to live apart, Kim.”

  “No, people get married because they love each other and want to make babies together, Mazer. People get married because they see happiness ahead of them with someone.”

  “Yes, but you don’t see that with me,” said Mazer. “You see a world of lonely, sleepless nights, worrying about whether or not I’m bleeding to death in a ditch somewhere.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You’re proving my point, Kim. Whenever I leave on assignment, you’re near crazy with worry. At first I thought it was endearing because it meant you deeply cared for me. Now it makes me sick to think about it. I can’t stand that I make you feel that way.”

  She turned away, back to the window.

  “I’ve always been afraid to start a family for this reason, Kim. When I joined up I resigned myself to being single. I wasn’t going to be an absent father and husband. Then I met you, and I convinced myself that I could make it work. I told myself that our commitment to each other and to our children would be strong enough to endure any separation. But now I see that I was only being selfish. I was thinking about my happiness, not yours. You deserve someone who can be with you and share the load every day of your life.”

  She didn’t turn around.

  “I can’t leave the military,” he said. “I’m in for at least five more years. I don’t have a choice on that. Asking you to wait until I get back from China is the same as asking you to wait five years, which I won’t do. That’s not fair to you.”

  He waited for her to move, to look at him, to say something. She didn’t.

  “Marriage to me wouldn’t be marriage, Kim. You’d be committed to someone who wasn’t there. You’d be raising children by yourself. I saw my father do that when my mother died and he moved us to London. He was not a happy man, Kim. Without my mother, he was a shell of who he was. He tried to stamp out all the Maori culture my mother had ingrained into me as a kid because it reminded him of her and it pained him too much to see it. The songs, the stories, the dances, he outlawed them all. I was to be a proper Englishman like him. An Anglo. As if Mother had never existed. Only, he couldn’t change the color of my skin. That stayed dark no matter how many boarding schools he put me in.”

  He crossed the room and stood behind her.

  “You don’t want your children to have only one parent, Kim. I know that life. I don’t want it for my kids, either.”

  She turned to him. She was crying but her voice was steady. “I’d like to believe that you’re being noble and self-sacrificing, Mazer, but all I’m hearing is that you don’t want a life with me.”

  He didn’t know how to respond. Of course he wanted a life with her. Didn’t she see that? The issue was it wasn’t a life they could have. It would be a life without each other.

  But before he could form a response, she went to her shelf, pulled down a Med-Assist device, and handed it to him. “One of the American versions,” she said. “With my voice. You said you wanted one, so there you are. Something to remember me by.”

  It was a dismissal. Everything they had built between them was brushed aside in that one gesture.

  It was what he had come to do, what he knew he needed to do for her sake, but now that it was done, now that the business was over, a sick empty feeling sank in his gut like a dead weight. He had to explain himself better.

  He didn’t get a chance.

  She walked out and left him there. He waited twenty minutes but she never returned. When employees started showing up and turning on the lights to the offices all around him, he tucked the Med-Assist under his arm and made his way to the lifts.

  It was the right thing to do, he kept telling himself. For her happiness, long-term, it was the right thing to do.

  CHAPTER 6

  China

  Mazer boarded the C-200 moments before takeoff and found five new HERCs strapped down in the cargo bay, each of them adorned with Chinese characters and the red-and-gold starred emblem of the People’s Liberation Army. Apparently he and his team were not only tasked with training the Chinese, but they were also to hand deliver the HERCs as well. It annoyed Mazer. It meant the deal with Juke and the Chinese had been in the works for some time and that the SAS could have told him sooner that he was likely shipping out.

  Not that it would have made much difference, he admitted. He still would have felt the need to cut ties with Kim, and having more time to do so would have only prolonged the inevitable. Either that or his courage would have failed him, and he would have convinced himself yet again that they could make it work. This way was best for her. Harsh and fast and then he was gone and she could get on with her life.

  He moved through the cargo bay and saw that the rest of his team was already aboard, each of them asleep in one of the bunks recessed into the walls. Mazer stowed his bags in one of the lockers and climbed into an empty bunk. His whole body felt heavy and fatigued and ready for sleep, but thoughts of Kim kept him awake long after takeoff. He kept replaying the scene with her in his mind, thinking of all the things he should have said differently. He took out the Med-Assist she had given him and clicked through it randomly until he came upon a tutorial on how to give rescue breaths. He hit play, laid the Med-Assist on his chest, and listened to the sound of her voice.

  He woke six hours later. His team was still asleep. He took the data cube Colonel Napatu had given him and attached it to his wrist pad. The computer read him the entire mission file as he prepared a large pot of chicken pasta in the aircraft’s kitchen area, using ingredients he found in the supply closet.

  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 diggin
g 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.