Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) Read online

  An iron grip seized Lem by the forearm and suddenly Charles was at his ear, whispering. “She doesn’t have to tell me to knock your teeth out, amigo. I’ll do it because I want to. Make her cry again and see if I don’t.”

  The man’s viselike grip released, and Charles casually got into the shuttle and drove away. Lem watched him go, rubbing his forearm.

  Fingers snapped behind him, and Lem turned. Simona was at the double doors, holding them open. “Your father is waiting, Lem.”

  She was her old self again, all business, perfectly poised, showing no sign of having just shed a tear. He followed her into a lobby. Lem didn’t know the place, but it didn’t look particularly special. Everything seemed dated, in fact. Old furniture. Old décor. An empty receptionist desk. Even the paintings on the walls were from ten years ago.

  “Time for an upgrade, wouldn’t you say?” Lem said. “This place is like a museum.”

  Simona didn’t reply. She approached a door, and it unlocked automatically. When she pulled it open, it was thick and heavy like a bank vault. They stepped into a pristine white corridor, and Simona pulled the door closed behind them with an echoing clang.

  “Okay. I’ll bite,” Lem said. “Where are we?”

  “A place that doesn’t exist,” said Simona. She started walking briskly, and Lem had to hurry to keep up.

  “That’s a little cryptic. What is this nonexistent place?”

  She didn’t look at him. “Are you prepared to sign a nondisclosure agreement?”

  “I signed one of those when I joined the company.”

  “This is different. This is special. You’ll sign or you won’t leave this facility.”

  He laughed. “Well now. There’s a threat. Is there a dungeon in here for people who refuse? I’ve always suspected Father had a dungeon. Stone walls; rusty shackles; long-haired, toothless crazy old men as cellmates.”

  She didn’t look at him or so much as crack a smile.

  They walked in silence a moment. Whatever working relationship they had developed since his return from the Kuiper Belt was gone now. He could see that. He had shattered that in the car.

  He cleared his throat and lost the flippant tone. “I’ll sign whatever you want me to sign.”

  She stopped, faced him, and held out her holopad. It was a white screen with a black line at the bottom.

  “What, now?” he said.

  “Just sign it.”

  “I don’t know what I’m signing.”

  “The document is two hundred and eighty pages long. Shall we have a seat on the floor so you can read all the legal language you don’t understand?”

  He let the insult pass. He probably deserved it. “In a sentence can you at least tell me what I’m signing?”

  “And you’ll believe me?”

  “I was an ass to you in the car, so you certainly have every right to screw me over right now. But I also know that you’re a good person with a conscience. Yes, I trust you.”

  She brushed the hair out of her face. “Is that an apology?”

  “An attempt at an apology.”

  She exhaled. “You were more than an ass.”

  “Yes. That’s true. I was worse than that.”

  “A troll.”

  “Okay. Not where I would go. A little too mythical for me, but yes, I was a troll.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, the holopad in the air between them, then she gave an exasperated sigh. “This is typical nondisclosure. Whatever you see in this facility can never be spoken of to anyone outside this facility. Even to me or to your father. It says if you break that agreement, we can sue you for all the money in the world and cut off your testicles.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Except in your case, since you don’t have any testicles, we would probably just sue you.” She held up her stylus.

  He took it, signed, and gave the stylus back to her.

  Simona tucked her pad under her arm and started walking again.

  Lem kept step beside her. “So what is this place and why am I here?”

  “You’re here at your father’s insistence. As for why it’s secret, it involves, like most things in this company, very proprietary tech. Have you ever heard of Project Parallax?”

  “Should I have?”

  “Only if you’re an academic. An astrophysicist, say. Or a cosmologist. Project Parallax began eight years ago. It was an attempt to position satellites with high-powered telescopes at the outer edge of the solar system. Without the debris of our system clouding their views, the parallax satellites could give scientists a better look at the deep reaches of the universe.”

  “The Parallax Nexus,” Lem said. “The database at universities. I have heard of this. We did that?”

  “We do that. The nexus is still in operation, though it’s managed through a subsidiary. The satellites, however, still belong to corporate and are still functional. They feed data back to the system continually. Research facilities, universities, space agencies like STASA. They all pay us a subscription fee to get data from the satellites.”

  “Subscription fees? That sounds like chump change. Is this profitable?”

  “Hardly. But we enjoy very generous tax and tariff breaks from agencies with oversight of the space trade. That helps immensely.”

  Lem looked at the white walls. “So this is Project Parallax. I don’t get it. What’s so secretive about it? Every college kid who walks into a university library can log in to the Parallax Nexus. The data is there for all to see. We’re wide open on this.”

  “I’ll let your father explain that part.”

  She stopped at a place in the wall with an outline of a door. Lem would have walked right by it had she not stopped. A small, pink, cubed holofield appeared above a white shelf to their right. Simona inserted her hand into the field and did an intricate series of movements, as if she were spelling a lengthy word in sign language. There was a quiet click as the locks disengaged, and the door swung inward.

  They stepped across the threshold and into … the solar system.

  Lem stopped. He was standing in outer space—or so it seemed, although he could still feel the floor beneath him. Before him were planets, asteroids, moons, all in miniature, all emitting a little light, floating at chest height. Simona walked past him, passing through a few asteroids, then the sun, to reach Father, who was standing on the opposite side of the dark room, speaking with a technician.

  Brief words were exchanged, and then Simona and Father crossed back to Lem.

  “Have you heard anything from Victor or Imala?” Father asked.

  The fake concern on Father’s face was infuriating. You were the one who told me to cut them off, Father, Lem wanted to say. You were the one who sent the drones that likely killed them, after I begged you not to. And now you have the gall to act like you care?

  With Simona present, however, Lem only said, “We lost contact when the drones attacked.”

  Father exhaled deeply and put his hands on his hips. “It’s my fault.”

  Lem said nothing. If Father was waiting for him to argue the point, he was in for a disappointment.

  “Are you all right?” Father asked.

  “Me?” said Lem.

  “They were your friends. I know this can’t be easy. This wasn’t your fault, son. I bear all the blame.”

  Damn right it wasn’t my fault, thought Lem.

  His father’s words had struck him, though. Were Victor and Imala his friends? No, theirs had been a working relationship, nothing more. Victor despised Lem. Imala had been warmer, but not by much.

  “You’ve seen the news,” said Father. “About China.”

  “They’ll blame you when they learn where the drone attack came from. They’ll say you provoked the Formics and cost millions of lives.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Simona. “Militaries have been attacking the mothership since the beginning. Ukko was trying to protect Earth. Why would they blame him?”<
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  It bothered Lem that Simona had referred to Father by his first name. It was too casual, unlike her.

  “Lem’s right,” said Father. “This is what news programming does, Simona. They vilify people. And nobody’s easier to hate than the wealthiest man alive.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” asked Lem. “The company might not survive this.”

  “The company, the company. I don’t care about the company, Lem. I thought I was clear on that. If the human race goes the way of the dinosaurs, it won’t matter if we hit our quarterly earnings goals. Our job is to end this.” He put an arm around Lem’s shoulder and gestured to the solar system. “So tell me, what do you think of our holofield?”

  “Why am I looking at the solar system?”

  “Why indeed,” said Father. “We call this the Big Room. It’s not an original name, I admit, but it’s appropriate. This—” he made a sweeping gesture of the space. “This is like a screensaver. It’s not to scale obviously. Nothing is actually this close together. But now that you’re here, we can get started.” He tapped his wrist pad, and the solar system disappeared. Light filled the room, revealing a massive, empty white space half the size of a gymnasium. The floor was transparent, with hundreds of holoprojectors positioned beneath it.

  Above Lem, suspended from the ceiling, was a square light rig holding as many holoprojectors as there were below him.

  Three squares in the floor began to rise like towers. They stopped half a meter off the ground, forming three cubes, close together.

  “Sit,” said Father, gesturing to the cubes.

  Lem sat.

  Father took the cube opposite, and Simona sat at the third.

  “There was a technician here a moment ago,” said Lem. “He disappeared.”

  “There are close to a hundred technicians in this facility, Lem,” said Father, “all behind these walls. They come and go through the doors as needed. Simona calls them the elves.”

  “What do they do exactly? These technicians. What is this?”

  “This, son, is the business we are in.”

  “Holoprojection?”

  Father laughed. “No. Information, Lem.” He waved a hand at the empty room. “Project Parallax has always been about information. Seeing what no one else can see.”

  Father tapped his wrist pad, and the room went dark again. A white light appeared in the center of the three cubes, floating in the air between them like a tiny hovering campfire. The light changed, took shape, and became the flat ecliptic plane: the sun, the planets, the solar system. Two dots of light on the plane of the ecliptic beyond the edge of the system and directly opposite each other began to orbit the solar system.

  “The Parallax satellites,” said Lem. “Simona explained this already.”

  “I didn’t tell you how many satellites there were,” said Simona.

  As Victor watched, another orbit ring appeared with two more satellites—this plane perpendicular to the ecliptic—the galactic plane. A third orbit ring, at a thirty-degree angle: the galactic celestial plane. Then a fourth ring, at sixty degrees: the galactic equatorial plane. All formed a gyroscope of satellites orbiting the system.

  “There are eight satellites,” said Father, “all with telescopes looking outward into deep space.”

  “And these satellites are functioning?” said Lem. “They work properly?”

  “Very well,” said Father.

  “Then why didn’t they see the Formics coming?”

  Father smiled and shook a finger. “An excellent question. The short answer is, the Parallax satellites weren’t designed as an alien warning system. They’re made for research and for detecting collision threats. And when I say research, I mean they’re looking way out there at a specific object or cluster of galaxies, holding a very tight field of view, like a laser dot in the sky, whatever it is that sparks the astrophysicist’s fancy. When the satellites aren’t doing that, they’re flagging light-reflection objects moving in normal parabolic patterns that pose a threat to Earth.”

  “But the Formic ship is a threat to Earth.”

  “Yes, we know that now, but it wasn’t moving in a way that the Parallax computers recognized. We program it to look for very specific things. Giant alien ships moving in ways no one thought possible was not one of those things. And keep in mind, the space between these satellites is tremendous. Opposing satellites on the same plane could be ten billion kilometers away from each other or more. Nor are they fast moving. For satellites they’re extremely slow. So no, they didn’t see the Formics coming, and frankly I’m not at all surprised. Space is very big, son.”

  “This is all very fascinating,” said Lem. “And I commend you for building your satellite telescope thingies that didn’t actually prove very useful when we needed them to. But I fail to see the relevancy here. We lost the drones, Father. You may not care about the company. But everyone who works for this company does. You need a game plan. You need to prepare a response. Ukko Jukes kicked the hornets’ nest. Ukko Jukes aggravated Formics and incited a second wave. The headlines write themselves.”

  Father frowned. “I’m disappointed, Lem. I thought for sure you would see the possibilities a configuration like the Parallax would provide.”

  “Really? We’re still on this Parallax thing? The future of this company is hanging by a thread, Father. And that thread is suspended over the crapper. So unless these Parallax satellites are also time machines that allow us to go back and have a do-over with the drones, I don’t see the point.”

  Father sighed wearily and tapped his wrist pad. The original screensaver solar system returned, filling the room. “Information, Lem. That’s why Parallax matters. The possibilities for useful, profitable information.”

  Lem scrunched up his shoulders. “Sorry. If we’re playing a guessing game here, I fold. What am I not seeing?”

  “If the Parallax satellites can carry scopes that look outward, they can also carry scopes that look inward.” Father tapped the wrist pad, and hundreds of additional objects appeared in the room, scattered across the solar system within the ecliptic. Lem stood and walked to one near him. He leaned down to get a better look at it. It was a ship, a digger, no larger than his fingertip. He reached out, touched it, and it ballooned in size to be as large as he was. Lem recoiled a step, startled. Windows of data popped up around the ship, identifying it as a MineTek asteroid digger, C-class—a competitor’s vessel. There was a list of all the asteroids it had visited and mined from, as well as a complete ship manifest: the captain’s name and photo, the full crew, equipment, weapons, drive system; it was all there.

  Lem turned and looked back at his father. “You’re spying on the solar system?”

  “Not spying, Lem. Observing. Gathering information. With the gyroscope we can see everything we need to know to improve our operations. We can avoid the asteroids that are already occupied by a competitor’s vessel, for example. Or we can identify new, potentially viable asteroids—”

  “Or you can track competitors’ trade routes,” said Lem. “You can know everything the other guys are doing and then sabotage and obstruct their operations. You can know who to buy off, who to avoid, where the real money is.”

  “You make it sound devious, Lem,” said Father. “But this is how a company operates. I’m not doing anything illegal here.”

  “Illegal, no. Unethical, maybe.”

  Father looked annoyed. “This is why we succeed, Lem. This is why we have the market share we do. Every company in the world does this. They gather and use information. We just do it better than anyone else.”

  “This doesn’t reek of privacy issues to you?”

  Father laughed. “Privacy? Are you telling me a CEO on Earth can’t stand on the roof of his building and look down at the street and count how many of his competitor’s trucks drive by?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No. It isn’t. Scale doesn’t matter. Just because we’ve got a taller building, so to sp
eak, doesn’t make it suddenly wrong.”

  Lem shook his head. “So you knew. As soon as the Formic ship came into system, you knew what it was, and yet you pretended not to.”

  “No, I didn’t know what it was, Lem. The interference from the Formic ship disrupted the Parallax satellites as much as any other. We went dark for several months. The satellites continued to collect images, but they couldn’t transmit. Now that the radiation has dissipated, and transmission lines are reopening, we’re slowly coming back online. Now the satellites are inundating us with every image they’ve taken since they transmitted the last time, before the interference.”

  “This all has a point, I’m sure,” said Lem.

  “When you attacked the Formic ship in the Kuiper Belt, Lem, who joined you?”

  The question was such a non sequitur that it took Lem a moment to respond. “A free-miner ship. El Cavador. Why?”

  “There was a third ship,” said Father. “One that didn’t participate in the actual attack.”

  “A WU-HU ship,” said Lem. “It took all the women and children from El Cavador. We never saw what happened to it. We couldn’t radio it. Everything was chaos.”

  “The ship survived, Lem.”

  For a moment, Lem was speechless. “How do you know that?”

  Father smiled. “That unethical information is suddenly quite useful, isn’t it?”

  “These were innocent people, Father. This isn’t a game. What happened to them?”

  Father tapped his wrist pad, and the solar system disappeared save for a single yellow dot of light, floating in the black expanse. Lem approached it and touched it. The yellow dot ballooned outward until it was a WU-HU outpost two meters across.

  “It’s in the Asteroid Belt,” said Father. “One of several outposts WU-HU has in that sector. This is a computer-generated model based on schematics. The color might be wrong, but this is essentially what it looks like. According to Parallax, this is where your WU-HU ship went. There would be food there, Lem. The captain there is a good woman. If we’re reading her profile right, she would have taken them in. Fed them. Sheltered them. I thought you would want to know.”