Shenzu bowed, eyeing the floor again. "If I may also add, General, I would be happy to corroborate your story. If asked, you can claim I was your liaison to the MOPs. That would add credibility to the account. The idea that you contacted the MOPs and coordinated with them without any assistance strains believability, sir, not because you are incapable, but because your movements and communications are so closely watched. You would need help within the military to pull this off, sir. An accomplice. Preferably someone of my rank. As a captain I am high enough in rank to go where I please, yet low enough in rank that my movements would largely go unnoticed. Your more senior officers do not have that luxury."
"You would lie under oath?" said Sima. "You would perjure yourself? Is that how little you regard your own honor?"
"My honor is my most valued possession, sir," said Shenzu. "Greater even than my life. By validating your story, sir, I am protecting China. Is that dishonor? To preserve one's homeland? To aid one's general? I think not. I would consider it my highest honor to stand with you and protect your good name."
General Sima rubbed at his chin and was quiet a moment. "And why would I choose you as my liaison?"
Shenzu kept his eyes down. "I have worked closely with the drill-sledge teams for over a year, sir. I know the tech. I also have a history with Captain Mazer Rackham, whom I brought from New Zealand to train our HERC pilots. Mine is a face he trusts. You of course knew all of these details, and thus called me into your office and gave me this top-secret assignment."
Shenzu bowed again and took a step back.
General Sima turned to the vids still hovering above the table. After a long moment he turned back to Wit. "What of the traitors who gave you the nuke? They will obviously know I'm lying. They could come forward and contradict my story."
"They won't," said Wit. "They were never going to come forward in the first place, but they certainly can't do so now. MOPs have given you the credit. This is your victory to claim."
General Sima studied each of their faces then came to a decision. "Very well. MOPs have been under my command for five days now. Captain Shenzu has been serving as my liaison." He turned to Shenzu. "You will prepare a full report of the activity of those five days, Captain, with minutes from our meetings and details of my plans to destroy the lander."
"Yes, sir," said Shenzu.
"Make sure those meetings do not contradict my actual itinerary. I don't want our fiction to have historical inaccuracies." He turned to Wit and Mazer. "In the meantime, we need to find a place for you and your men in my army. How many men are in your unit?"
"Eighteen when we left them, sir," said Wit. "Plus we have an eight-year-old boy in our company. An orphan. He sort of attached himself to our unit. We'd like to find him safe passage to a secure location away from the fighting if possible."
Sima raised a disapproving eyebrow. "You've been fighting Formics with an eight-year-old child?"
"He's safer with us than he would be on his own, sir," said Mazer. "We don't involve him in the fighting directly. We've done our best to protect him."
"My army is not a daycare," said Sima. "He has no place here. Nor can I afford to send a transport. The best I can do is find a place for him at Dragon's Den, which may be safer than going north anyway."
"Dragon's Den?" asked Mazer.
"An underground facility a hundred klicks from here. It was originally designed as a safe house for senior Party officials and their families in the event of a global war. Several thousand refugees have already gathered there. Local villagers mostly. The facility is well beyond capacity, but we'll find your orphan boy a cot to sleep on and food to eat."
Mazer nodded. A wave of relief swelled inside him. They were going to get Bingwen to a safe place. "Thank you, sir," he said.
"I'm sending you there as well," said Sima. "Both of you." He looked to Wit and then back to Mazer. "If you're truly under my command now, as you say, you will follow my orders to the letter. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"We have a team of bioengineers here in Lianzhou developing a counteragent for the Formic gas. The CMC is of the opinion that the team is too exposed here. Their lab isn't designed to withstand a direct attack. If the Formics learned of their intentions and swarmed the facility, Beijing doubts we could adequately defend them. I have therefore been ordered to move our bioengineers, their equipment, and all hazardous material to a lab at Dragon's Den. The bioengineers will continue their work there, underground."
"You said there were civilians there," said Wit. "Is it wise to bring a lethal substance inside an enclosed space where civilians are being housed?"
"The tunnels are vast," said General Sima. "Civilians are kept in an area apart from the military and far from the lab. In the event of an emergency, the various wings can be sealed off from one another. It's not an ideal situation, I agree, but this is hardly an ideal existence we're living. You and Captain Rackham will join the armed escort taking the bioengineers to Dragon's Den. The convoy leaves tomorrow morning at 0600. You will rendezvous with the other MOPs at Dragon's Den and await further orders. Captain Shenzu, you will accompany the escort as well. Isn't that what a MOPs liaison would do?"
"Yes, sir," said Shenzu.
"In the meantime, escort these men to the hotel where the other officers are staying. Give them each a vacant room and a fresh uniform." General Sima turned to Mazer and Wit. "The hotel has hot water. It's fresh and uncontaminated. I suspect you haven't had a shower and a good night's sleep in quite some time. I suggest you take advantage."
He crossed to the glass window and stood there, hands clasped behind him, looking west toward the river and the camp beyond it. Mazer was beginning to think they had been dismissed when Sima said, "Have you ever lost soldiers under your command, Captain O'Toole?"
"Yes, sir," said Wit. "More than I care to admit."
"And what about you, Captain Rackham?" asked Sima. "You're young. Perhaps fate has been kinder to you."
Mazer's thoughts went to Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt. Somehow he got the words out. "I have lost soldiers as well, sir."
Sima nodded. "To lose a soldier is a type of death. A lesser death than the one that will take us all, but a death nonetheless. If we did not feel so, I suppose we would be unfit for command." He turned and faced them. "I have lost upwards of ten thousand since this war began. All of them sons and daughters to me. If we do not stop this gas, this weapon of the enemy, I will lose them all. See to it that I don't."
CHAPTER 6
Reinforcements
When Victor awoke in the cargo bay he was weightless again, his arms floating out beside him in the air, his feet anchored firmly to the wall.
"Victor, can you hear me?"
A voice in his ear, over the radio. He blinked again, his mind still in a fog. "Imala?"
"You blacked out. Are you hurt?"
She was out in the shuttle. He remembered now. He had fallen from the cart, and his boot magnets had saved him. He had initiated them as he was falling, and he had kicked out frantically toward the wall until one of the boot soles had snapped against the surface and held. Gravity had swung the rest of his body downward like a pendulum, and he had slammed into the side of the wall with such force that he was certain he had broken something.
"Answer me, Vico. Are you hurt?"
"My ankle," he said. "I think I sprained it." The pain was throbbing and hot.
"Yes, it's starting to swell," said Imala. "I have your biometrics here in front of me. I'll inflate and cool the area."
Victor winced as the suit around his ankle filled with air and dropped in temperature.
"You're in the open, Vico. You need to move. There's a shaft near you. Can you reach it?"
Victor reoriented himself and took in his surroundings. The shaft was fifteen meters to his right. "Yes. I can make it."
"Then move," said Imala. "You're near the debris, and one of the Formics may have survived the fall."
Victor turned and looked in the direction
he had fallen, shocked to see how close he had come to death. The wreckage from the human ships had scrunched together into a giant mangled heap, only ten meters from his current position. Had he fallen any farther, he would have impaled himself on a jagged piece of metal protruding from the pile.
Imala was wrong, though. If there were Formics in that heap, none of them could have survived.
Even so, he needed to get out of the open. He bent forward, attached his glove magnets to the wall, and began to climb, wincing in pain whenever he pushed off with his left foot. He reached the shaft, climbed inside, and concealed himself in the shadows.
From here he had a good view of the cargo bay. The inner wall of the bay had taken a beating from the gravity. Whole sections of wall had crumpled inward and broken free, exposing rows of tightly packed pipes underneath. The pipes all seemed to be running in the same direction from the front of the ship toward the rear. There were valves and fasteners on the pipes every few meters, and to Victor's surprise none of the pipes appeared damaged.
Elsewhere, where the inner wall had held, cart-pulling Formics had gone back to work, pulling their cargo on the tracks as if nothing had happened. A few had stopped at places where the inner wall in front of them had been ripped away, leaving them no more track to walk on. They stood there, stuck, unable to advance.
"What happened, Imala?" Victor asked. "Why did we suddenly have gravity in here?"
"The ships that attacked must have fired a weapon that somehow created gravity inside the ship."
"How is that possible?"
"No idea," said Imala. "But all of the cannons on the surface of the Formic ship were crushed against the hull like tinfoil. That's why you blacked out. You were feeling too many Gs. It's a miracle your boot magnets held."
"What happened to the attacking ships?"
"Destroyed as well. Once the cannons were gone, the irises on the hull of the Formic ship opened and unleashed the plasma. The attacking ships were vaporized in an instant. I recorded the whole thing. That's why you're weightless again. The gravity weapons were destroyed."
"Where did these ships come from? Who has a fleet that large?"
"They weren't ships, Vico. These things were too small to be ships. They were drones."
"Drones? If Earth had drones, why did we launch manned fighters? Why risk pilots' lives if you didn't have to?"
"Because these drones aren't from Earth," said Imala. "I just backtracked their flight path. They came from Luna."
"Luna?"
"And that's not the worst of it. All of our com lines with Luna went dark right before the attack."
It all became clear to Victor in an instant. "Lem. That bastard sent a drone fleet to kill us."
"But why?" said Imala. "He financed our attack, Vico. He gave us the shuttle, our gear."
"Of course he did," said Victor. "This was his golden opportunity. We put our heads on the chopping block and placed an ax in his hands. Don't you see? We went to him for help, and he saw it as an opportunity to silence us. Think, Imala. Lem and Ukko both want us gone. You're a whistleblower, I'm a witness to a crime Lem committed. What better way to make those two problems go away than to erase us."
"It doesn't make sense, Vico. You're suggesting Lem invested all this money into this operation just to bump us off? There are far less expensive ways to kill people. If he had wanted to silence us he could've done that on Luna."
"Then why did we lose contact with Luna right before the attack?" said Victor. "And no, Lem couldn't have dealt with us on Luna. There was too much attention on him. He was dogged by the paparazzi. And Ukko wouldn't take that risk anyway. A scandal like that would topple the company. This is cleaner. No witnesses. No one knows we're even out here. No one would connect us with Lem."
"Benyawe could," said Imala. "She was helping us, Vico. I can't imagine she would be a part of this."
"Maybe she didn't know. Maybe she thought Lem was legitimate."
"But then she and Dublin and the others at the warehouse who all saw us preparing for this would be loose ends. Are you suggesting Lem would silence them as well?"
"I'm suggesting they're all corporates, Imala, and they'll do whatever is necessary to protect the corporation."
"I can't believe that, Vico. Benyawe and Dublin are good people. They worked hard to help us."
"Who else would send drones from Luna, Imala? Who else has the capability to build a fleet like this?"
"I'm not saying these aren't Juke made, Vico. I'm saying we don't know the circumstances. Maybe Juke sold the drones to the Americans. Or to China, or to NATO."
"Even if that's the case, Imala, Lem could've told the buyer, 'Oh, by the way, we have a strike team at the ship at the moment. Be a lamb and don't blast it to hell just yet, if you don't mind.'"
Imala said nothing.
"They cut all communication, Imala. They cut us loose. If it wasn't Jukes, why didn't they send a warning? The drones came from Luna. They would have seen them long before we did."
Imala said nothing.
"They knew we were here, Imala. They knew I was inside. So they attacked the ship to destroy it and counted our corpses as a consolation prize. Then they become world heroes, and all their problems go adios. The money Lem put into this is nothing to them, Imala. They were willing to pay twice that just to dump me out in the Belt, remember?"
"But Benyawe--"
"Is one of them," Victor interrupted. "They may have kept her out of the loop, but you can be sure she's toeing the line now."
Imala was silent a moment. "So what do we do now?"
"When we're done here we go back to Luna and jettison Lem Jukes into space without a helmet. That's what we do."
"What do you mean, when we're done here. We are done here, Vico. We lost the duffel bag. It's under a mountain of debris. And even if you could reach it, the bomb and equipment will have been crushed. You're lucky it didn't detonate already. We're through here."
She was right. The whole plan had been in that duffel bag. Victor peeked over the lip at the wreckage. There was no sign of the bag anywhere, and Victor doubted he could separate any of the pieces that had been crushed together. Plus, if the bomb was damaged, it would be dangerous to try to recover it. Still, they couldn't leave empty-handed.
"I still have my helmetcam, Imala. And Earth still needs information about this ship. I'm going to the helm to gather what intel I can. If anything happens to me, you know what to do."
He waited for her to object, but she said nothing.
"You're not going to argue?" he said.
"Why waste my breath?" said Imala. "You're more bullheaded than I am. You'll go regardless of what I think."
He smiled. "Turn off all communication equipment with Benyawe in case they attempt to reconnect with us and confirm we're dead. Suit biometrics, ship monitoring, cut it all. We go totally black. Let them think we are dead. Then redirect all my helmetcam data somewhere else, a private cloud account, maybe. Somewhere Lem can't access it. Because if he has it, he'll bury it. The last thing he wants is the world knowing he tried to erase us."
"There are data satellites I can use," said Imala. "I'll program a timer and a fail-safe into the account, with instructions to forward everything to the nets if we don't log in every twenty-four hours. That way, if something happens to us, the data doesn't go undiscovered."
"Good," said Victor. He repositioned himself and zoomed his visor binocs to a space across the room where the inner wall had fallen and pipes lay exposed. "I want to check those pipes out first. They must carry the plasma to the irises."
He crawled to the edge of the shaft, made sure no one was looking, aimed his body, and launched. The kick with his left foot sent a stab of pain through him, but he tried to ignore it, soaring across the room, aiming for a spot on the wall to the left of where the pipes were exposed. He twisted his body at the last moment and landed expertly, his ankle blossoming with pain.
He crawled toward the pipes using his hand magnets.
When he was within a few meters, alarms on his suit went haywire, screaming in his ears.
Bweep. Bweep. Bweep.
A message flashed on his HUD. WARNING. RADIATION.
"The pipes," he said. "They're radioactive."
"Get out of there!" shouted Imala.
Victor recoiled and launched again. He landed on the opposite wall, turned and launched a third time, this time aiming for a shaft that led toward the center of the ship. He landed near the shaft entrance and crawled inside.
"Are you all right?" asked Imala.
"I think so," said Victor.
"Do you feel light-headed at all? Nauseated?"
"I didn't get radiation poisoning, Imala. I wasn't exposed long enough. I should have known they'd be radioactive. They're funneling gamma plasma. The ship has a ramscoop drive. It collects hydrogen atoms as it flies through space and uses the subsequent gamma radiation both for fuel and as a weapon. Did you see the nozzles? Every few feet there are T-shaped nozzles on the back of the pipes that extend up to the hull and the irises. If we had a way to close off those nozzles, the plasma couldn't fire. We'd render the ship defenseless."
"There are tens of thousands of irises, Vico. Thus tens of thousands of nozzles. You couldn't close them all even if you had an army of helpers. And you can't access most of them anyway. They're behind the inner wall and run the length of the ship."
"I didn't say it was possible, Imala. I'm making an observation."
Victor froze. A half dozen Formics in heavy, protective suits had just crawled out of a large shaft across the room, pushing two massive carts. The shaft was at least four times the width and height of the shaft Victor was in.
Four of the Formics removed a large sheet of metal from one of the carts and carried it to where a portion of the inner wall had fallen away. They positioned the sheet over the exposed pipes, and the other two Formics sealed the metal plate into place.
"A repair crew," said Victor. "To cover the pipes. They must know when radiation leaks into the ship."
"You'll need to find another way out," said Imala. "You can't get back to the original shaft this way without being seen."
"First the helm," said Victor.
He turned away from the cargo bay and headed up into the shaft. It was dark and narrow and littered with dung and dust. Victor blinked out a command and his suit began to create a map of his progress. He passed glow bugs and intersections and side passages. At times the shaft widened to accommodate another track, but Victor stayed true to his original course, heading toward what he hoped was the heart of the ship. He had expected to encounter more cart Formics, but he saw none. His ankle had swollen despite the cool pack and increased pressure, and the pain had settled into a dull, throbbing ache.