The Swarm

by Orson Scott Card

  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.”

  “Beats getting a doily to the chest,” said Sham.

  “What if the front of the shield were covered in a layer of Nan-Ooze?” Mazer said. “It could surround and smother the doily on impact, before it exploded.”

  “I’ve never seen Nan-Ooze move that fast,” said Rimas. “The doily would detonate before the Nan-Ooze surrounded it.”

  “Maybe the Nan-Ooze doesn’t have to move at all,” said Mazer. “It’s nanotech in a weightless environment. We can make it as thick as necessary, say, fifteen centimeters to give the projectile a deep enough surface to embed itself. And we control the consistency of the Nan-Ooze as well, soft enough so that the doily punches into it and yet not so soft that the Nan-Ooze splatters.”

  “Like lard,” said Rimas.

  “The doily gets completely submerged before it detonates,” said Mazer. “It would dampen the explosion, take the brunt of the blast. It might even be enough to keep you on your feet.”

  “And even if the Nan-Ooze disperses violently,” s
aid Sham, “it can self-propel and return to the shield.”

  “I still can’t shake the problem that now I’m one-handed,” said Kaufman. “I’ve got this unwieldy thing strapped to me, impeding my movements.”

  Mazer shrugged. “So maybe the Nan-Ooze doesn’t cover a shield. Or maybe it’s not even Nan-Ooze. But the idea of nanotech remains. So we get a semipermeable cloud of nanobots that loosely form a shield. Marines can see through it like thin haze. But as a doily approaches, the haze forms into a shield to enfold the doily and encase it, to make it nothing but a harmless thud against their bodies.”

  “So the shield’s not strapped to me?” Kaufman asked.

  “No,” said Mazer. “It’s a hovering cloud of nanobots. They only have to be flight-capable in zero atmosphere and zero G. They could hold themselves in place relative to each other by magnetics.”

  He flipped on the holotable, and began drawing up what he had in mind. It was a crude sketch—Mazer was no artist—but his team understood the basic design. They discussed it for several hours, tweaking the design as they went along until they had a concept that felt practical and addressed all their concerns. By then Shambhani had replaced Mazer’s original sketch with a detailed model.

  “You know, this actually might work,” said Shambhani.

  “I have no idea how to build it,” said Rimas. “I’m no nano-engineer. But the idea seems solid. If nothing else, it gives the development guys a starting place. This could save a lot of lives.”

  “Agreed,” said Mazer. “Good work. I’ll post the design on the forum and see what everyone thinks.”

  The forum was an online community Mazer had created on the IF’s intranet. Junior officers from all over the solar system gathered there to share tactics, tech ideas, and new intel on the enemy, including academic papers and whatever the scientific community was publishing about the Formics.

  When the forum launched two years ago, Mazer had assumed he would get a few dozen participants at most. Now the site had over two thousand daily users.

  Mazer waited until he was in the barracks that night and zipped up in his sleep sack before logging in to the forum with his tablet. He browsed for a few minutes, checking the sub forums for any new posts. A researcher out of Caltech was studying a small organelle harvested from one of the Formic cadavers. A Chinese chemical company was developing genetically altered rice seed that was supposedly resistant to Formic bioweapons. A lieutenant overseeing a team of laserline operators at a relay station near Jupiter had tweaked their transmitter’s operating system and increased transmission speeds by 14 percent. His post included instructions on how others could do the same.

  Mazer skimmed through these posts and others, soaking up whatever he thought significant. He read through some of the comments and was pleased to see that they were polite and well-considered. New insight was shared, feedback was given, modifications were proposed.

  It baffled Mazer that most senior commanders didn’t think this way. They hated sharing intel. The idea of a forum would make their eyes twitch. Intel was something to keep hidden and use only for personal gain.

  Mazer didn’t understand it, and he knew it was a waste of time to even try. Nothing he did would ever change their thinking. All he could do was share his own.

  He generated a new post and uploaded the model of the nanoshield, describing it in detail and inviting criticism. Is this feasible? Worth pursuing? What are the possible drawbacks, defects, dangers, consequences? Then he published the post, signed off, and waited for feedback.

  His inbox was next. He smiled when he saw the e-mail from Kim. Were all wives this faithful in their correspondence, he wondered. Kim wrote every day, no exceptions. Even when she was working double shifts at Imbrium Memorial on Luna, she still found time between patients to tap out a quick message.

  The hospital was being inundated with refugees, her e-mail said. A virus was spreading through the camps. Nothing life-threatening, but the hospital was keeping infants and the elderly and the worst cases for observation. Beds were scarce. Mazer could almost hear the frustration in Kim’s words.

  The refugees were mostly free miners from the Belt who had sold their ships to the IF to support the war effort and escape the trade. The miners had used the funds to reach Luna and now had nowhere to go. Few had enough money to carry their families to Earth, and even those who could afford passage were now uncertain if they wanted a life in Earth’s gravity. Decades in zero G had left some of them so weak-boned and unambulatory that life on Earth would mean confinement to a wheelchair.

  “The news reports don’t do these people justice,” wrote Kim. “They’re afraid. The adults as much as the children. The war ended three years ago, but for them it’s an ongoing fight. If I spoke Farsi and Vietnamese and all the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, I could maybe comfort some of them and put their minds at ease. But for many, I can only smile and give their hands a squeeze. It would break your heart to see some of these parents clinging to their sick children.”

  She ended the way she always did: “Tell me you’re safe. Remember I love you. Believe we can win.”

  Mazer read the e-mail again. She was there in the words. Everything he loved about her was on display. And yet it pained him to read it because she was a world away, living a life he was no longer a part of.

  He closed his inbox and opened the vid he kept on his desktop. The sound was muted, but Mazer had watched the vid so many times, he could practically hear every word. Onscreen Kim waved at the camera from the kitchen of their apartment on Luna as she chopped vegetables for a soup she was making. Mazer had recorded the vid on their second week of marriage. Him, stationed on Luna. Her, new to the hospital. They both worked impossible hours, but at least they could sleep in each other’s arms at night—even if it meant one of them was getting to bed long after the other had already turned in.

  Such a brief window of time, he thought. They had known then that the Formics were returning, but there were days when they had allowed themselves to forget for a few hours how uncertain their future was. It was what a marriage should be. Now it seemed unlikely that they would ever have days together again.

  As always, Kim’s final sentence left him off balance: Believe we can win. Have faith in the IF, she was saying, faith in yourself. He couldn’t tell her how impossible that was, first to believe and then to achieve. News flash: The unrelenting human spirit was not going to be enough. All of us exerting our best effort, tech, tactics, and strategies would still leave us on the losing side. Last time we were lucky; this time we have no chance.

  He pushed the thought away, closed the vid, and returned to the forum, hoping to find a few responses to the nanoshield, anything to take his mind off the life he should be living on Luna.

  To his surprise, the forum was exploding with new posts. COPERNICUS DESTROYED read the title of one. HEGEMON HOLDING PRESS CONFERENCE NOW read another.

  Mazer quickly climbed out of his sleep sack and launched across the barracks toward the holotable. Copernicus. One of the eight Parallax telescopes placed in orbit out beyond the solar system. Before the war, scientists had used the scopes for exoplanet research or to track potential collision threats coming into system. Once we realized the Formic fleet was coming and only a few years away, the Hegemony had seized control of the telescopes to track the Formic fleet’s approach. Copernicus was the most important of the bunch, for it was positioned out beyond the system between us and the Formic fleet, giving us our best view of the enemy.

  Now it was gone.

  Mazer flipped on the holofield and dug through the transmissions that trickled in constantly from Luna, not caring how much noise he was making.

  Shambhani appeared at Mazer’s side, shielding his eyes from the light and still fighting sleep. “What’s going on, Mazer?”

  “The forum,” said Mazer. “We’re getting reports that Copernicus has been destroyed.”

  Shambhani was awake in an instant. “Destroyed? By what? Please tel
l me it was a collision.”

  Mazer was hoping the same. A collision would be a natural phenomenon, perhaps from a comet or asteroid or dense cosmic dust. Or perhaps even from another man-made object, though all of those possibilities seemed highly unlikely. Copernicus was a tiny speck in a massive stretch of empty space. The chances of it getting struck by anything were incredibly small. Plus, the satellite had a collision-avoidance system that would push it out of the path of any approaching threat.

  Mazer found the file a moment later. It had come in on the news feeds on the last transmission cycle, broadcast an hour ago. He selected it, and the flat vid began to play in the holofield. Ukko Jukes, the Hegemon of Earth, stood at a podium. He had aged since Mazer had seen him last, and he looked weary. Behind him hung the seal of the Hegemony, and to his left stood various admirals of the Fleet.

  “Approximately ten days ago,” said Ukko, “Copernicus, one of the eight Parallax satellites, was destroyed by a single Formic fighter.”

  The words were like a blow to Mazer’s chest.

  “How is that possible?” said Shambhani. “The Formics aren’t even here yet.”

  “Quiet,” said Rimas. Others in the barracks were gathering now.

  “Let me emphasize,” said Ukko, “this Formic fighter was alone. The Formic fleet is still a great distance away from our system. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that the Formics are upon us, ready to engage our outposts and ships in the Kuiper Belt. That is not the case. While we should all be alarmed, this should not incite a panic. That said, Copernicus is a significant loss. Of all the Parallax telescopes, it was the most valuable militarily, giving us the best view of the Formics.”

  The word “view” was used loosely here, Mazer knew. We could not “see” the Formic fleet in the traditional sense. Copernicus was a computer. It merely spat out data. Analysts then extrapolated likely ship positions, distances, and speeds, filling in the gaps with guesswork and probabilities. Earth still didn’t know how many ships were coming, for example. But the data from Copernicus, incomplete as it was, was invaluable.