The Swarm (41 page)

He took a breath, and found the mask empty too. He reached into his hip pouch and gave the regulator another quarter turn. Nothing happened. He opened the regulator all the way. Nothing. He was out of oxygen as well.

A feeling of exhaustion and defeat settled over him like a physical weight. He had tried. He had fought and he had pushed and he had struggled and had persevered, but it wasn't enough. He wasn't prepared for this. He had naively come inside, and now he would die a fool. And for what? What had he gained for the good of the IF? A few samples of metal pellets that would never be analyzed? A minute of vid of a fat slug sliding through mucus. Oh yes, how monumental. How critical that intelligence must be. Congratulations, Victor, you will not have died in vain. Thanks to you the world knows precisely what a Formic slug looks like. Stop counting votes, Nobel Prize committee, we have a late entry in the biology category and the stupidity category as well. A sure winner.

He shook his head. He had been stupid and zealous and had thrown his life away.

He reached into another of his small hip pouches and pulled out the igniter. It was a little thing, no bigger than half his thumb. He had made it before coming aboard, knowing that the air might be volatile, knowing that he might be seized by the enemy, knowing that it might be necessary. Better to blow up the whole thing than to let them cut him open and root around inside him.

It was funny really. The igniter was such a small thing, capable of causing so much destruction. He would just have to flick the switch to create the flame, and that would be it.

Would he realize what was happening in the instant before the hydrogen in the air ignited? Would he see it, hear it, feel it? Or would the explosion happen so quickly that he would be obliterated before his brain had a chance to process the event?

And what of Imala? Was she clear? Or did she have the quickship parked right next to the cocoon? If he detonated, would he inadvertently hurt her as well?

He held the igniter up to his face, examining it, considering. And that's when he saw a darker shade of black in the distance behind it. He raised his light.

It was the ship. Maybe sixty meters away, just beyond the horizon of the asteroid. The thrusters were protruding through the resin wall, and the nose of the ship was anchored to the surface via several extended legs, like a spider.

He could make it. He could get there. He didn't know if it would do him any good in the end, but he knew he could make it.

Question was how. He was in a slow drift, inching forward, sliding along the resin wall. Soon the friction would stop his forward momentum completely. Could he push off the resin to launch down to the asteroid? It was pliable, so would it just bow with the force of his launch? And would the resin hold? Or would it break and tear? And even if he could reach the asteroid below him, how would he move on the surface? And for that matter, how could he
stay
on the surface? He couldn't anchor his feet. It was solid rock. He had thought there would be ice, but the Formics had melted it all to make the atmosphere. There was nothing to cling to. So once he reached the surface, what would he do? Crawl with his hands?

He had no choice. He would have to trust the strength of the resin. And he would have to breathe the atmosphere.

He rotated his body and put his feet against the resin, squatting down. His feet were spread apart to disperse the force of the launch as much as he could, thus minimizing the likelihood of punching through the resin. He made sure he was standing on the tightest cluster of filaments and not solely on the membrane. Then he launched. It felt, for a moment as if he hadn't launched at all and that he had merely succeeded in pushing the resin away from him.

But no, there was some forward movement. Not much, but some. A negligible speed. Almost imperceptible. It would take several minutes to reach the asteroid's surface at this rate, and at any time another Formic could attack. He felt short of breath and pulled the oxygen mask down off his mouth. There was oxygen in the air, but every breath with the hydrogen felt like poison. How could he make himself go faster?

The armor. It had mass. If he shed it and pushed it away from him, it would exert on him an equal, opposite force. He unsnapped the clasps at his hip, which locked the upper, torso portion of the armor to the bottom half. Then he reached back and did the same at the small of his back. It took some wiggling, and he had to pass the spear from hand to hand, but he finally got the torso of the armor off. He would have to push it away just right, though. He would need to point his body toward the surface and align his spine with the direction of the force. If his angle was off, even by a little, the force would put him into a spin.

He draped the spear across this back again and brought his knees up close to his chest. Carefully he maneuvered the upper armor so that the chest of the armor was flat against his feet. Then he aligned his body and pushed off.

The armor shot away from him, and Victor felt himself pick up speed. Not much. But some. Enough to make him feel like the effort had been worth it. He closed the distance in a matter of seconds and came down gently onto the rock.

Without the bulky gauntlet atop his mining gloves, his fingers had greater mobility and grip strength. Even so he scrambled desperately for a moment until he grabbed something he could hold on to. His fingers found purchase on the lip of a small, narrow tunnel, and he brought his feet down and stuck the toes of his boots into two small holes. Now he was anchored on the surface. But he could no longer see the ship. He would have to climb the asteroid like ascending a cliff face. And there were just enough small holes all over the surface that it might work.

His orientation shifted in his mind. The asteroid was no longer down. The ship was up, his feet were down. He tapped the inside of his boots to make the toe crampons pop out for him to use. Then he dug in again with the toes and reached upward with a free hand and gripped the lip of another hole.

He ascended one step at a time, securing each handhold and foothold before he continued. He worried that at any moment another Formic could attack and he'd be torn away from the wall. But no Formic came.

After a minute of climbing he came to the largest tunnel entrance he had seen thus far. It was big enough for him to crawl into. He shined his light in, and the tunnel extended straight back a good distance and then turned downward. A Formic could easily fit in there.

He climbed around it and continued upward. How much hydrogen was in his lungs now? he wondered. He pushed the thought away and continued. There was nothing he could do but hurry.

After another few minutes of climbing the ship came into view. He climbed a little farther until he was certain that he could launch to it. Then he retracted the crampons in his boots, anchored his feet, bent down low, pointed his body, and launched.

He soared through the air faster than he had intended, forgetting that he had shed the mass of the upper half of his suit. Even so, he had good control. He tucked and spun as he and Imala had practiced, and he landed feet first atop the ship with a loud clang that echoed through the space. The surface of the ship was smooth, however, with nothing to hold on to, so before his momentum sent him tumbling elsewhere, he twisted and launched again immediately toward one of the spidery anchor legs. He crashed into the unforgiving metal and threw his arms around it. Pain shot through him in three places, but he clung to the metal nonetheless.

He tasted blood in his mouth and could feel more blood draining from a cut above his eye. He wiped at his brow, and sure enough his glove came back red. He shined his light on the spider leg and saw that it had six segments with internal cables and pulleys and hinges. The legs were clearly designed to fold outward and keep the ship perpendicular to the asteroid. The pulley system looked ancient, and the metal was rough and discolored.

He shined his light on the ship, searching for a hatch or door or some point of entry. But there wasn't one. The side of the ship was perfectly smooth. He shined his light at the nose of the ship and saw that the nose was blunt and flush against the surface of the asteroid. There had to be an entrance there. A door that led directly into the tunnels of the rock. But how to reach it?

He clung to the spider leg and searched with his light around the base of the ship until he found a large tunnel entrance. It extended inward for a meter and then cut to the left toward the nose of the ship. That had to be his way in. That had to lead to the nose. He began to climb around the spider leg so that he could position himself on the side of the leg closest to the tunnel. Then he would point his body and launch. But just as he was moving, a Formic crawled out of the tunnel in question and hurled itself directly at him. Victor retreated to the opposite side of the leg again, and the Formic slammed into the leg on the other side. It scrambled, trying to get its footing, reaching for him, clambering, moving around the leg, desperate to attack. Victor moved around the metal structure in the opposite direction, keeping the metal leg between them. When they had switched positions, and Victor was closest to the tunnel, he turned and launched, reaching back and pulling his spear free as he flew.

He twisted in the air and slammed his back into the asteroid right near the tunnel entrance, the wind knocked out of him, his head ramming back into the wall so hard it nearly knocked him out. He saw spots at the corner of his vision as his head rang with a dull fog of sound. But the spear was up in his hand, and its end was anchored against the wall like a pike, ready to meet the Formic that was already soaring through the air after him, arms outstretched, maw opened, ready to attack.

The Formic impaled itself on the spear point, colliding into Victor in a hairy, violent mess of flailing appendages. Victor pushed the spear away, and the creature exhaled a final raspy breath before becoming still. Victor left the spear where it was and crawled into the tunnel. And there, just as he turned the corner, was the entrance to the ship, a wide circular doorway tall enough for him to walk into standing upright. He pulled himself forward out of the tunnel and into the ship. To his right on the wall was a circular crank. He wondered if it would close the door. He turned it clockwise, and sure enough the blades of an aperture began to extend, closing the entrance.

Victor heard a noise out in the tunnel, a pattering of feet. He paused to shine his light out into the central tunnel that extended straight back into the rock for quite a distance. And there, coming toward him, racing up the tunnel, were a pair of Formics hurrying for the entrance. They were pushing off the narrow walls with their various feet, launching as much as running, soaring at him in zero G. If they got inside, he'd lose. He was unarmed and exhausted. He spun the crank as fast as it would go. The aperture blades seemed old and rusted and painfully slow. And the closer they got to closing, the harder it was to turn the crank. The blades of the aperture were almost touching when the Formics slammed into them. There was a furious scraping and pounding on the door as Victor strained and pulled and finally sealed it closed. His arms were burning from the exertion, and he felt like throwing up. A second door was behind the first, he realized. He found a second crank and turned in, and two panels came out of the floor and ceiling and met in the middle and locked.

He was inside.

He turned around and shined his light in the dark space. The ship was small. Barely ten meters long and quite narrow. The strong, putrid organic smell that he had only detected faintly outside was thick in here. Like rotted plants, mixed with feces. A single aisle extended up the middle of the ship, with oddly shaped shelves on either side. The shelves held rows of round habitats made of packed mud or stone.

For the slugs, Victor realized. The Formics had brought the creatures with them all this way. And yet he had seen more slugs in the tunnels than there were habitats to house them, suggesting that the Formics had bred more slugs upon arrival. These habitats were made just for the parents.

But why were the slugs here to begin with? What was their purpose? What did the Formics want with pellets of metal? Why had they built this habitat around this rock? All of his struggles and fighting and nearly dying, and he still had zero answers to give the IF.

He moved up the aisle. Shining his light in each of the habitats, relieved to find them all empty.

He found another crank on the wall to his right, this one three times the size of the ones near the door. This controls the ship's spider legs, he thought. He knew it instinctively. He grabbed the crank and turned. It wouldn't budge clockwise, so he turned it the other direction, and it spun easily. Unseen gears ground and squealed, reverberating inside the ship, and Victor felt the ship shift a little. Yes, he was retracting the legs. The ship suddenly felt unsteady. He continued to spin, and the legs continued to retract and fold inward, or at least that's what Victor assumed was happening. At last there was a snapping and locking sound, and the wheel couldn't spin any farther.

All that held the ship now in place was the resin that had grown all around the thrusters creating an airtight seal. But what could Victor do now? There was no instrument panel, no flight controls. There were three cranks and rows of rock habitats. That was it. And yet somehow, the Formics had flown this craft. It had a powerful thruster. It had targeted and reached the asteroid precisely, flying billions of kilometers to get here. So where were the starcharts? Where were the nav computers? The terminals?

He hovered upright in the middle of the aisle, looking around him, desperate for a throttle or wheel or way to fire retros. There had to be retros. The ship had made a delicate landing. It had touched down on a rock hurtling through space. It had come in gently, with surgical precision. How had it done so?

He spun in the air. He could still hear the dull sound of fists pounding on the closed doors outside, the two Formics desperate to get in.