The Swarm (2 page)

Still, Mazer had remained patient. No, optimistic, believing that the threat to the human race would eventually take precedence over all other considerations. Yet now, stationed at an IF outpost at L4—gravitationally balanced between Earth and Luna—Mazer's hope in the IF was fading.

He didn't let them stop him, however. He had his missions and he would fulfill them. The International Fleet might rot from the inside out, but Mazer would do his duty as best as he knew how.

After several minutes of concentration, he finally found the pattern in the capsule's spin.

Mazer blinked a command to initiate the gyroscope to see if he was right. A holographic model of the capsule appeared on his heads-up display—HUD—inside his helmet. He had been correct. There was the pattern of his spin. A constant through space, giving order to a seemingly random tumble.

He blinked a second command and the holo disappeared, replaced with an image of his target: an old derelict supply ship directly ahead of him. The ship had been pulled from a scrapyard somewhere and painted and modified to resemble a miniaturized version of the Formic scout ship.

A familiar voice sounded over the radio. “Four hundred meters to target.”

It was Rimas, one of the three marines in Mazer's breach team. They were each inside their own capsule tumbling through space behind Mazer, heading toward the same derelict ship.

The tactic had worked once in the last war, but the capsules in that instance had approached their target from multiple angles. The IF wouldn't always have that luxury in combat, so the IF had devised these smaller capsules with advanced avionics. Could a team of four marines approach a target from the same direction and carry out a complex, coordinated strike without colliding with one another or raising alarms?

“Three hundred meters,” said Rimas. “Get ready, my fellow guinea pigs. Prepare for exit and launch.”

Shambhani spoke next. He was the youngest of the bunch. A Pakistani from Karachi. “We're not guinea pigs, Rimas. We're lab rats. Running through mazes. Pushing buttons. Getting shocks. But no prize at the end.”

Kaufman, the fourth member of the team and a former commando in GSG9, the special ops unit of the German Federal Police, laughed over the radio. “We can't be lab rats, Shambhani. No rat would be stupid enough to crawl inside these cans.”

Mazer smiled. Lab rats. It was a fair comparison. As marines in the International Fleet's Weapons and Materials Research Division—WAMRED—it was Mazer and his team's responsibility to test the latest experimental tech being considered for combat. Everything from biometric-enabled socks to shielded landing crafts. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. Some of it was so stupid in its design that it was more likely to get a marine killed than save him from the enemy. The stupid designs were easy to dismiss, but tech like the capsules was harder to evaluate. Could they work? Yes. Would they work? Probably not. And it was in this gray area of ambiguity where the bureaucrats and defense contractors did their worst, with everyone fighting to protect their own proposed tech and projects. It meant a lot of bad tech was getting the rubber stamp of approval, and there was little Mazer could do about it.

“Two hundred meters,” said Rimas. “Here we go, Captain. The radio is yours.”

“All right, gentlemen,” said Mazer. “Now that we're all dizzy and discombobulated, let's get to work. Know your rotation. Exit smart. If you miss the target, you'll drift off into oblivion and be no help to any of us. We land, we set the charges, and we clear the area. Rimas you have point.”

“Yes, sir.”

They had practiced the maneuver dozens of times, but they knew better than to treat this as routine. They would go in as if their lives depended on it because one day that might be the case. Precise movements, complete coordination. Anything less was failure.

A chime sounded in Mazer's earpiece. A proximity warning. “Approaching the drop,” he said. “Here we go.”

When his capsule got to its nearest approach to the ship's surface, Mazer opened the door, pulled himself out of the cockpit, and fired propulsion from the back of his spacesuit, pushing himself, untethered, toward the target ship.

The maneuver would be impossible if he didn't first understand how the capsule was spinning. And even then it was incredibly difficult to pull off, not only because of the capsule's rotations but also because the capsule was approaching the target not on a direct course, but at a diagonal vector that merely passed by the ship at a safe but short distance. A collision course would alert the Formics' collision-avoidance system; they would fire on the capsule to protect their hull. But a nonthreatening flyby would likely go ignored. The trick was getting close enough to make the leap and yet staying far enough away so as not to draw attention. All without altering the original course of the capsule—for any sudden shift in trajectory might raise Formic alarms.

Mazer tapped his propulsion twice more, then brought up his feet and landed on the hull. The soles of his boots were made of Nan-Ooze, a thick gel composed of thousands of nanobots that attached to every scratch or irregularity on the surface of the ship. Mazer ordered the Nan-Ooze to go rigid, and it solidified inside the scratches, locking his feet in place and anchoring him to the ship.

He drew his slaser—short for self-aiming laser—and advanced toward the breach site, walking as quickly as his goo boots allowed. He scanned right and left along the surface of the ship, keeping an eye out for any computer-generated Formics that might appear on his HUD.

Ahead of him, Rimas landed on the breach site, a large circle on the side of the ship. Rimas then knelt in the center of the circle and anchored the guidebox to the hull. The guidebox emitted four low-powered lasers, pointing north, south, east, and west, indicating where along the edge of the circle Mazer and his team should place the four cubes of the breach weapon.

Gungsu Industries, the Korean contractors who had built the weapon, called it a gravity disruptor—GD. It used four tidal forces to tear an opening in the ship large enough for the marines to crawl through. It did so with four separate cubes placed on the surface of the ship in a square pattern. The four corners of the square created four overlapping triangles that could tear apart any surface. Yet to work, the cubes had to be placed exactly right, meaning far enough apart that the curvature of the hull would put the surface in the straight lines between them. Placed wrong, the cubes could create shrapnel clouds or fail to tear a large enough hole.

Rimas left the guidebox in place and went to one of the four points where a cube should be set. He pulled his cube from his pouch, twisted it to activate it, and set it Nan-Ooze side down. “Rimas here. The baby is delivered.”

“Roger that,” said Mazer. “We're right behind you.”

Mazer and the others reached the circle as Rimas stood up and drew his slaser, covering them.

Mazer moved to his assigned position and removed his own cube from his pouch. He twisted the mechanism to activate it, noting once again that the action felt far too cumbersome with his bulky gloved fingers.

There's too much assembly here, he thought. Too many possibilities for human error. We need to simplify this before we move to live tests. He made a mental note to inform the engineers.

“We've got bugs,” said Rimas.

Mazer lifted his head and saw, projected on his HUD, five virtual Formics in spacesuits scuttling on all six appendages across the surface of the ship toward them, each of them armed with a glowing jar weapon and moving fast. The augmented reality simulation melded so well with the real environment that Mazer instinctively reached for his weapon. Then he calmed and focused his attention back on his cube, leaving the Formics to Rimas, his point man.

Rimas took out four Formics with four quick shots, and the creatures exploded into pixels before disappearing from everyone's HUD.

“Cube Two is set,” said Kaufman. Then he was up on one knee, aiming his slaser and picking off Formics with deadly accuracy. For every two Formics vaporized, four more appeared in their place, closing in from multiple sides and firing their jar guns as they came.

Shambhani swore.

Mazer turned and saw that an image of a doily was now projected onto Shambhani's chest along with the words
KILLED IN ACTION
. “You're hit, Sham,” said Mazer. “You're out.”

Doilies were small, flat, bioluminescent organisms fired from the Formic jar guns. In any other circumstance they would be beautiful to look upon. Weblike in structure, they resembled a magnified snowflake, with its many symmetrical crystals and stellar dendrites—or an intricately crocheted doily lying atop an antique piece of furniture. Here, however, encircled about in a clear gel as thick and sticky as tar, doilies were weapons of death. The gel acted as an adhesive when the doily struck its target. Then, upon impact, the doily released a peroxide polymer that reacted violently with the adhesive gel. The polymer was a natural injury response, chemicals released to cope with internal bruising. Formics had obviously engineered the doilies to overexpress the polymer, in much the same way that bacteria are tricked into overexpressing proteins. The result was a contained and highly directional explosion, tearing apart the human's spacesuit and all the bone, skin, muscle, and organs inside it. Mazer had seen it happen, and they were memories best forgotten.

“I can finish it,” said Sham. “I'm almost done.” He was still trying to open and set his cube.

“You're dead,” said Mazer. “Stop. Nothing you do from now on will count in our results. Leave it for me.”

Mazer locked down his own cube. “Cube Three is set.” Then he launched himself at Sham, whose boot tips and knees were still anchored to the hull. Mazer collided with him, grabbing Sham around the upper body to keep himself from ricocheting off into space. Then Mazer swung his legs down, took Sham's cube, gave it a final twist to activate it, and anchored it to the hull.

“Cube Four is set,” Mazer said. “Clear the square.” He moved a safe distance away from the square and said, “Launch!”

He winked a command, and the Nan-Ooze sole of his boots released their grip on the surface save for a small square of Nan-Ooze in the center of his foot. Mazer leaped upward away from the ship, with the Nan-Ooze forming into a long thin polymer line, growing thinner and thinner as it extended, tethering him to the small square of Nan-Ooze still rooted to the ship.

Mazer was firing the whole time. He took out three virtual Formics. Then a fourth. Rimas and Kaufman fired also, soaring up beside him. Then Kaufman was hit, and his Nan-Ooze ceased extending.

Mazer soared another ten meters. Then his skinnywire snapped taut, stopping his ascent thirty meters above the ship.

“Fire,” he said.

Had the gravity disruptor been live, and not merely practice cubes, the cubes would have unleashed their tidal forces and ripped a hole in the hull, throwing the torn debris inward.

Mazer and Rimas took out the last few virtual Formics, and then all was still.

Mazer shut down his slaser and said, “Reel in.” The Nan-Ooze pulled him downward, the polymer nanotech line getting thicker and thicker until it formed back into the sole of his boot when he reached the surface.

At that point, the exercise was over.

Mazer got on the radio with the space station and called for an extraction. Then he turned to see that his teammates were all deep in thought, heads down, mentally retracing their steps. He had trained them to do this, to dedicate the time immediately following an operation to silently consider what they had just done. Where were they weak? What had they failed to consider? How could they improve?

They remained in silence for the duration of the flight back to WAMRED. It wasn't until they had changed out of their gear and gathered in the debriefing room, feet anchored to the floor, that Mazer spoke again. He started his recording device to ensure that he captured everything they discussed. “Mission succeeded but we lost two men,” he said. “Fifty percent wastage. Not acceptable. Thoughts?”

Rimas spoke first. “We had a whole Formic army coming at us from every side. We weren't ready for that.”

“There were a lot,” Mazer agreed. “But that might be exactly the battle conditions marines face.”

“It wasn't just the numbers,” said Rimas. “They were all staying really close to the hull this time. Combat-crawling. That made it hard to get a bead on them without standing up and further exposing myself. If I had had better cover from a standing position, I could've inflicted a lot more damage instead of worrying about getting shot.”

“There is no cover,” said Shambhani. “There's nothing on the surface of the ship we could have used.”

“What if marines were to bring cover with them?” said Rimas.

“How?” Kaufman asked. “In the capsules? There's no room for anything else. And if you make the cockpit any bigger to accommodate more cargo, you risk drawing unwanted attention to the thing. It starts looking less like debris and more like a ship.”

“What about shields?” asked Sham. “Like riot police carry. We could use them as covers for the cockpits. That way, the shield wouldn't take up any more room inside the capsule.”

“No riot shield is going to stop a doily,” said Kaufman.

“Not a traditional riot shield,” Sham said. “It wouldn't be made of fiberglass. You'd need something sturdier. Steel maybe.”

Kaufman shook his head. “Wouldn't work. Your feet are locked to the surface by Nan-Ooze. The force of the blast would slam you back against the hull of the ship. Your legs would break. Think ugly, compound fractures.”

“That's easy to fix,” said Rimas. “We program the Nan-Ooze to release all but one heel or all but one toe of the boot.”

“Fair enough,” said Kaufman, “but you're still going to get your ass slammed against the ship like a rag doll. You might not break your legs, but you're bound to break something. And anyway there are other problems. Steel would add a lot of mass. It would be hard to maneuver. Plus it would occupy one of your hands. Now you're one-handed.”