The Swarm (45 page)

“Where is Benyawe with the NanoCloud?” Lem asked.

Norja shrugged. “They've been prepping for a presentation with the Hegemony, Lem. They've been modifying a prototype. We haven't mass-produced anything. We're not ready to take this into combat. We're a year or two away from that. And even when we have mass-produced them, we still need to know the intricacies of these Formic warships so we can tell the nanomaterial where to go once they infiltrate the hull.”

Lem shook his head. “That's unacceptable, Norja. You're telling me an impossible scenario. We don't have two years. The normal production schedule is out the window here. If we operate as usual on this, by the time we have our NanoCloud ready and loaded onto IF warships, Earth will be a charcoal briquette.”

“What do you want me to do, Lem? Move the NanoCloud into production before it's been approved? Before we have funding? Do you have any idea how expensive it is to produce that material? The smaller it is, the higher the price tag, Lem.”

“I'm aware of the economics, Norja.”

“Then you know that if we start before we've secured funding from the Hegemony, we risk putting this company into a financial free fall. And we're not even certain the damn thing is going to work.”

“I saw a demonstration, Norja. The NanoCloud works.”

“You saw Benyawe wave a wand in a controlled environment. A laboratory is not a war zone, Lem. We haven't field-tested this thing.”

“Then we ask Benyawe to move her team to the Formic scout ship and start conducting field tests immediately. And we get on the docket with the Hegemony to present. Or I go directly to my father on this one. Because if our fleet departs on a preemptive strike without the NanoCloud on board, we lose.”

“A preemptive strike isn't going to happen, Lem. That would be the Polemarch's call. And the guy's a coward. He's like McClellan. He's way too cautious. He's not going to commit any ships until he knows the battle is in our favor.”

“Which will be never,” said Lem. “There will never be a scenario in this war wherein we have the advantage. He should know that.”

“I know.”

“Then why is Ketkar the Polemarch? If he's incompetent, what is he doing in that position?”

Norja hesitated, uneasy. “It's complicated.”

“Meaning what? What do you know?”

“Look, this is not the time or place to have this conversation, okay? We have a room full of dignitaries we need to entertain.”

“You think I want to sit down and finish my peas while engaging in political chitchat? I'm done with the meal, Norja. If you want to play host, fine. But I need to do something.”

“There is nothing you can do right now, Lem. This is in the hands of the people at CentCom. Let the IF handle this. That's why they exist. Come back inside and pretend to be interested in these boring people. We've got twenty minutes left in this event, tops. Smile, tell a funny anecdote, be charming. That's what we need. Do that, and you
are
helping the war effort. Because if these people can help us annihilate this tax, then that's more funds for projects like the NanoCloud.”

He stepped to the side and gestured for Lem to go in.

“We'll catch up later, Norja. Right now I have work to do, and it isn't here.”

He turned and left. Norja didn't try to stop him. Lem took one of the company subway cars back to his office, not certain what he would do once he got there. As soon as he opened the door, one of his assistants, Xianxo, sprang to her feet. “Mr. Jukes, I've been trying to contact you for the past hour, but no messages were getting through.”

“I was in a meeting. My wrist pad was off.” And you're not one of the important people whose messages I really care about, he thought to himself.

“A vid message arrived for you from Captain Nikula in the Kuiper Belt. The message was marked with high importance.”

“Who's Captain Nikula?” Lem asked.

“He's the captain of one of our mining ships, sir. His vessel is the Gungnir, an A-class digger. Mr. Ramdakan had ordered Captain Nikula to investigate a KBO possibly targeted by the Formics.”

KBO. A Kuiper Belt object. An asteroid essentially. Norja had said that a few of our ships were close to asteroids Edimar had identified as ones the Formics might have seized.

Lem moved toward the door to this right. “Send the vid to the holo room.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lem stepped into the room, removed his suit coat, and hung it on a hook by the door. A large image appeared on the far wall of a middle-aged man facing camera from the helm of his ship. Captain Nikula wore a Juke flight uniform not unlike the one Lem had worn when he had captained a company vessel. Lem waved a hand, and the vid began to play.

“This is Captain Franz Nikula of the Gungnir, ship registration 450081, property of Juke Limited. We arrived at the area designated by our starmap to be the current location of 2045LJ78, a KBO measuring one kilometer in diameter with an expected surface of water ice plus ammonia and a rocky core. However, the asteroid was not there. A thorough search of the sector alerted us to a large chunk of rock not currently on the starchart. The object was several hundred thousand klicks away and measured three hundred meters in diameter. We went and investigated this object, pictured here.”

The captain was replaced with vid taken from the ship's exterior cameras. It showed a disc-shaped asteroid with hundreds of small holes and tunnels all over its surface, lit by the ship's floodlights.

“We believe this smaller KBO is actually a fragment of the original asteroid 2045LJ78. You will note the holes all over the rock's surface. Initially we thought this fragment was chipped away from the asteroid as a result of a collision, but we could find no evidence in our Eye record to substantiate this idea. There was no object of considerable size coming in that could have collided with the asteroid.

“A further analysis of the sector revealed other unknown objects. When we quadrangulated their trajectories we discovered they all originated from a point along the orbit of the asteroid in question. This confirmed our suspicions that these other small objects were also fragments of 2045LJ78. The asteroid had broken apart roughly two weeks prior to our arrival and scattered its pieces in multiple directions.

“We then reexamined the records from our Eye to see if we could find when a heat signature had appeared. This would indicate when the Formic miniship had abandoned the asteroid. If we were lucky, the heat signature would also give us a trajectory of that ship, which we hoped to track.

“We did in fact find a heat signature in the record, but it was not what we had expected. There was a bright flash of heat right at the moment when the asteroid broke apart, which leads us to believe that the Formics did not
break
the asteroid but rather blew it apart with explosives.

“Also, after analyzing the original, heavily tunneled fragment of the asteroid that we recovered, we found no evidence of anything alien. No Formics, no tools, no small Formic ship. And yet something must have made those holes and dug those tunnels through the rock. They could not have occurred naturally. We will prepare a full written report and send it directly to Lem Jukes. Captain Nikula out.”

The transmission ended. Lem stared at the wall, now more confused than ever. Why would the Formics mine an asteroid and then blow it to bits? To cover their tracks? To prevent humans from discovering what they were doing there?

It was all so frustrating. Just when he felt as if he were getting answers, a mountain of new uncertainties avalanched him. We're fighting an enemy we don't understand, he thought. And what was it that Sun Tzu said? One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. But one who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement. That's us, thought Lem. We don't know ourselves or the enemy. The Formics are perfectly united in a hive mind that we cannot possibly grasp, and we're a fragmented, argumentative pack of egoists with more opinions than good sense.

Lem opened his e-mail to see if Captain Nikula's written report had come through. Instead he was surprised to find one from Edimar. He opened it and read it. Victor had gone inside the shell and recovered mined pellets of pure metal. Lem reread the letter than opened the attachments. He scanned through the images and watched in horror and fascination at the grublike creatures digging through the rock in Victor's vid. Then he opened the analysis of the pellets. Victor had found iron, magnesium, aluminum, nickel, silicon, and pristine ice. There might have been other metals as well, but Victor, in his desperation to escape, had not stopped to collect more samples.

Lem went back to Edimar's e-mail. She had written that she had sent this same information to “a certain IF officer.” She had not mentioned the name to protect the person's identity, but she clearly expected Lem to know who it was. It had to be Mazer Rackham. But Rackham was at WAMRED. What could he do with the information there?

The door to the holo room opened and Xianxo poked her head in. “Mr. Jukes, I'm sorry to disturb you, but there is a Captain Mazer Rackham here to see you.”

Lem stared at her a moment, too surprised to speak. “Send him in,” he finally managed.

Xianxo disappeared and then Mazer and a female officer entered. The woman was young and attractive, with olive skin and dark hair. Indian, maybe. Mazer looked exactly as Lem remembered him from three years ago, though now he was dressed in a rather formal-looking uniform.

“I'd offer you a seat, but there aren't any,” said Lem.

Mazer spoke first. “Mr. Jukes, I'd like to present Lieutenant Prem Chamrajnagar of the Judge Advocate General's Corps.”

Lem shook her hand. “An attorney. This gets more interesting by the moment.”

“You should have received an e-mail from Edimar,” said Mazer.

“I just finished reading it,” said Lem. “So you can imagine my surprise to have you walk in right at the moment when I realized she was likely referring to you.”

“I received my e-mail from her on the way over here,” said Mazer.

Lem was surprised. “So it wasn't her intel that brought you here? Now I'm even more confused.”

“I'm here to share information, get information, and hopefully make a deal,” said Mazer.

“What kind of deal?”

Mazer extracted a small data cube from his wrist pad. “Do you have a holoprojector?”

“This entire room is a holoprojector.”

Mazer handed him the data cube. “This is the exosuit Victor was wearing in his vid.”

Lem slid the cube into a slot on the wall, and a holocolumn in the center of the room appeared with a 3D model of the suit lazily spinning in the air.

“The helmet obviously needs a better seal,” said Mazer, “but Victor can work on that, as can your engineers. Otherwise, it's a smart design. There are other designs Victor has created as well. We need good engineers with mobile manufacturing capabilities to produce them.”

“Mobile manufacturing?” Lem asked.

“So that we can make new suits and modify the design on demand as the marines move toward the asteroids. I'm putting together a proposal for a special forces strike team tasked with finding out what the Formics are doing at these asteroids and then learning how to take them out. I'm hoping Juke Limited will take part in that proposal. We already have Gungsu contributing as well.”

Lem scoffed. “Gungsu? Why?”

“Short answer, some of their tech works very well,” said Mazer.

“And some of it doesn't,” said Lem. “Some of it is catastrophically ineffective.”

“No one knows that better than me,” said Mazer. “Victor is the chief engineer here. I trust his designs. Gungsu is offering expertise and manufacturing. I'm confident they can deliver. Just as I'm confident Juke can deliver. Victor had the right idea going inside the shell, but a team of trained soldiers working together has a better chance of achieving the objective.”

“You said this was a proposal?” asked Lem.

Mazer and Chamrajnagar exchanged glances. “Full disclosure,” said Mazer. “We're operating outside our authority here. Neither Prem nor I have the clout to put a project like this into motion. We don't have any senior-level sponsors. Nor do we have any funding. We're not even sure if the IF already has a plan in motion for the asteroids, but considering Edimar's obvious disdain for the Polemarch we're not counting on it. Basically we can't sit idle. Also, part of the reason we involved Gungsu was to end a bogus court-martial against me.”

“Court-martial?” said Lem. “My interest is piqued. If the IF is court-martialing you, as clean-cut as they come, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark. But you saw Victor's vid; these asteroids are filled with hydrogen. Blowing them up will be easy. They're bombs.”

“Even so,” said Mazer. “We'll still need to gather intelligence on what these asteroids are being used for. Why are Formics harvesting and processing metal and ice? And where do they want to push these asteroids? Finding those answers is going to take a well-equipped insertion team. And a team is going to need suits.”

Lem paused, studied the holo one more time and nodded. “Jukes will agree to produce the suits if we win Hegemony approval. I suppose you want to be paid big bucks for the design.”

“Victor did the work,” said Mazer. “Not me. He should get the big bucks.”

“So you want nothing in return?” Lem asked.

“Talk to your father, Lem. Get the funding from the Hegemony. If there is money allotted to this, the IF will make it happen. They'll launch. I only ask that I'm on that ship when it does. Perhaps your father can put in a good word to the Strategos on my behalf.”

“The Strategos knows who you are, Mazer. If it comes down to him picking people, you can bet you'll be at the top of that list.”