The Swarm

by Orson Scott Card

  “So you have anecdotal evidence,” Mazer said. “Not statistical evidence. Your conclusions are based solely on your personal interactions with a limited number of patients who meet specific criteria. Because I could provide plenty of anecdotal evidence to counter that position. Every major engagement in the history of warfare probably has plenty of examples.”

  The doctor narrowed his eyes. “I do not have to justify my conclusions to you, Captain. Nor did I come here to debate soldier psychology.”

  “No, you came here to mark me for light duty,” said Mazer. “And you made that decision the instant you saw my history. Putting me on the treadmill and through the tests was just perfunctory.”

  “Get out of my way, Captain.”

  Mazer opened the door, and the doctor launched out into the hall, where Nardelli was waiting. The doctor spun, launched again, and was gone.

  Nardelli smiled sardonically at Mazer. “Good news, Rackham. I’ve just received orders to escort you to the dock. Your court-martial on Luna awaits.”

  Interesting. As soon as they build a case against me, they get right to it.

  Mazer showered, changed into his uniform, packed his few belongings into a rucksack, and then followed Nardelli down the corridor. When they were alone, Nardelli stopped and faced him. “Do you have all your belongings in your rucksack there, Rackham? Every last one?” He took the earpiece out of his ear and rolled it between his fingers, giving Mazer an icy smile.

  Mazer sighed inside. It was obvious that Nardelli was trying to rile him. Vaganov had probably ordered him to do so. Get him to take a swing at you, Vaganov might have said. Let’s add assaulting an officer to his growing list of charges.

  It was a ridiculously stupid approach, because only an idiot would fall for it. And it gave Mazer pause. Why was Vaganov so eager to discredit him? Did Vaganov’s crimes go deeper than Mazer suspected?

  Whatever the reason, Mazer wasn’t playing.

  “You can have my earpiece,” said Mazer. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Nardelli smirked. “You’re not supposed to talk, Rackham.”

  “I’m making an exception for you,” said Mazer. “Consider it a gift, one soldier to another.”

  Nardelli gripped his riot rod. “You’re not a soldier, Rackham. You’re a traitor.”

  Mazer felt a little sad for the man. “I’m going to give you some unsolicited parting advice, Nardelli. Whatever Vaganov promised you, it’s not worth it. His interests are terribly misplaced, and when he goes down, he’s going to take you and everyone else he’s enlisted to do his dirty work with him. I’m betting you already have a few strikes on your record. That’s why Vaganov noticed you and made you his battering ram. But that’s a doomed road, my friend. I’m not your enemy. The Formics are, and we’re going to need every capable soldier when they get here. You do your family or Earth no good behind bars.”

  Nardelli laughed. “You’re the one being court-martialed, Rackham, not me.”

  “That can change rather quickly,” said Mazer.

  Nardelli’s expression hardened. “You threatening me, traitor?”

  “I’m asking you to be sensible for the good of the human race. You obviously want to pick a fight. But I’m not going to take the bait. So let’s just part before one of us does something he’ll regret.”

  Nardelli grabbed Mazer by the arm and pulled him down a side corridor. “Yeah, well, my only regret is that I didn’t do this a long time ago.”

  The space station’s main cargo hold was at the end of the corridor. Nardelli dragged Mazer in, pushed him to the side, and began rolling up his sleeves. Mazer anchored himself to the floor and calmly took in his surroundings. The room was massive, at least thirty meters high, with an open space in the middle for cargo lifts to move freight around. The walls on the left and right were stacked floor to ceiling with storage bins, each bin roughly two meters cubed. The long rows and tall stacks of bins made the walls look like giant square honeycombs. Mazer stood by an empty bin on the floor level. The bins had no fronts, and only a few of them were empty. Most contained metal cargo cubes that fit snugly into each bin. Food, medical supplies, fresh water, spare parts, equipment. A short metal bar extended halfway across the front of each bin, holding each cargo cube in place. The bar was attached to the side of the bin, and when the bar was lifted, the cube was free to be extracted.

  Mazer experimentally tried turning the bar nearest him and found it easy to rotate. A round button was on the side of the bin beneath the bar. Mazer pushed it, and as he had expected, the back wall of the bin slowly came outward. Had there been a cube inside, the advancing wall, and the unseen mechanism behind, would have pushed the cube free.

  Nardelli assumed a fighting stance, fists up, jaw set.

  “Do you really want to do this, Nardelli? This is schoolyard bully behavior. You should have outgrown this a long time ago.”

  Nardelli smiled. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

  Mazer put his hands behind his back, looking relaxed. “I’m special forces, Nardelli. They trained me how to crush a man’s windpipe. It’s not difficult. Normally the larynx is quite elastic. But out here in space, the thyroid cartilage and cricoid cartilage ossify. They get brittle and break easily. One hit is all it takes. All those joints and cords and sinew and cartilage will rip and pop and shatter. Pain, Nardelli. And blood. Even before it kills you, you want to die.”

  Nardelli raised his fists a little higher, protecting his neck. He didn’t charge.

  Mazer stepped to his right and turned the lever upward, freeing the cargo cube inside; then he pushed the button and continued to his right, keeping his eyes on Nardelli. The mechanism in the back came to life and pushed the cargo cube outward. Weightless, it drifted free of the bin and continued toward the bins on the opposite side.

  Nardelli easily sidestepped it, letting it pass, hands still up.

  “Or there’s a carotid artery on either side of your neck,” said Mazer. “Specifically your carotid sinus. I hit that and the baroreceptor cells get all wonky and confused and tell your brain to slow down your heart to drop your blood pressure. It happens fast. You black out. I then drive my boot into your crotch while you’re asleep. If you wake up again, you’ll wish you hadn’t. The pain isn’t pretty.”

  “You’re trying to stall me,” Nardelli said. “You’re half my size. I can break you easy.”

  Mazer kept moving to his right. “A smaller size gives me the advantage, Nardelli. You’re a big, easy, lumbering target. More mass in zero G means you need more energy to move, and when you do it’s harder for you to maneuver. You don’t need a PhD in physics to know that.”

  Mazer released another cube and kept moving to his right. Nardelli looked like he would charge but then hesitated. The second cube passed him.

  “What were Colonel Vaganov’s instructions to you specifically?” Mazer asked. “To get me worked up into a frenzy? To agitate me enough so you could bust me on assault charges?”

  Nardelli said nothing.

  “Not a very smart plan,” Mazer asked. “Fleet attorneys aren’t stupid. They’ll look at your record, and they’ll look at mine, and who do think they’ll believe, Nardelli? You?”

  Nardelli said nothing.

  “Subtlety is not your strength,” said Mazer. “You laid it on a little too thick. But I have to hand it to you. There were a few times when I almost gave in and broke your arms.”

  “So come try, Rackham.”

  “And how convenient that all the workers in the cargo hold are absent at just the right moment. Did Vaganov give them instructions, too?”

  Nardelli said nothing.

  “What you’re doing here is career suicide, Nardelli,” Mazer said. He kept moving to his right. He pushed another lever up, hit the button. A cargo cube scooted outward.

  “Colonel Vaganov can’t give you illegal orders,” Mazer said. “Come with me to Luna. Talk to an attorney. You have a pretty good defense. He’s a colonel. They train us to obey
colonels. He put you in a difficult situation. Of course, Vaganov’s probably too smart to have spoken to you directly. Your orders probably came from one of his officers. Which one was it?”

  Mazer pushed up another lock bar and hit the button. The mechanism in the back whined as it turned on, and the cargo cube eased out of the bin.

  Nardelli charged.

  Mazer launched upward, his boot magnets already turned off, easily avoiding Nardelli’s reach. Nardelli grabbed at air as Mazer tucked into a ball and got his feet pointing in the opposite direction. He landed lightly on the ceiling, but he launched again immediately, heading toward the bins on the opposite wall. He caught himself on the lip of a bin halfway between the floor and ceiling. He pulled up the lock bar, hit the button. The cargo cube drifted out, floating across the room.

  Nardelli looked up at him. “That’s how you fight, Rackham? Running away?”

  Mazer moved to his right, pulled down another bar, hit another button. Another cargo cube drifted out.

  Nardelli drew his riot rod, then launched upward directly at Mazer.

  The man wasn’t well trained in zero G combat, Mazer noted. He was launching all wrong. His center of mass was off, his legs weren’t set, and he clearly had no plan for stopping himself other than his intended collision with Mazer.

  Not smart.

  Mazer moved a bar and hit a button, and Nardelli, with no way of changing his course, collided with the cargo cube as it was pushed out of the bin and into Nardelli’s trajectory. There was a thud and a grunt of pain, and Mazer launched away. He released two more cubes as Nardelli drifted aimlessly, having ricocheted off the cube, arms flailing.

  This is how it was in the Formic scout ship during the firefight, Mazer thought. Big chunks of debris. Obstacles obstructing our view and our flight. The Formics maneuvered around them easily, experienced in zero G, but we weren’t ready for it. We hadn’t trained our minds to think in a three-dimensional space. A huge oversight. That needs to be fixed.

  Mazer landed on the lip of one of the bins near the ceiling and watched Nardelli struggle. There were nine cubes drifting lazily through the room at various heights, bumping into each other and forming a cluster of obstructions. Nardelli was having a hard time maneuvering around them. He jumped and landed on one, got his footing, and launched to another. The top of his head was bleeding, and he was seething now, desperate to get to Mazer. But he was floundering too; all of his movements were uncertain and awkward, and it frustrated him all the more. He leaped to another cube, but this one must have been empty because it began to rotate when he hit it at the angle he did.

  Nardelli panicked, struggling to keep his orientation with the floor. As the cube rotated one way, Nardelli countered by crawling the other way, trying to stay on what he perceived as the top of the crate, as if he feared he would fall off the cube to the floor. No Formic soldier would make such an obvious mistake.

  We clearly have a lot of work to do with our soldiers.

  Nardelli tried launching away from the empty cube, but its mass was not that much greater than his, and it drifted away from him with the same degree of force that he had applied. Instead of launching toward Mazer, Nardelli rotated out of control and drifted away, floundering again, flailing his arms and legs, and cursing.

  He’d be that way for a minute or two, Mazer figured, which was all the time Mazer needed. He launched down to the exit, grabbed his rucksack, and headed for the hangar.

  The shuttle was at the dock waiting for him. Mazer reported to the loadmaster, who scanned Mazer’s ID bracelet and welcomed him aboard. Mazer stowed his rucksack and took a seat in the back. He was not the only passenger. About a dozen other soldiers were buckled in, but none of them seemed to pay him any attention, which was a relief.

  Mazer watched the door, half expecting Nardelli to fight his way onto the shuttle to finish what he had started, bloody head wound and all. But several minutes passed, and no one else came on board.

  Mazer lowered the terminal screen hidden in the seatback in front of him and typed up an e-mail to Kim before the shuttle decoupled and he lost the connection. He was coming home, he told her. He loved her. He was excited to see her.

  He did not tell her that his military career was likely over, or that the IF was plagued with nearsighted careerists. Nor did he mention that his hope for a victory was all but extinguished. Kim didn’t like depressing e-mails. And anyway, when he saw her again, he wanted to see her smiling. If they only had a little time left together, he wanted every moment to count.

  CHAPTER 11

  Shuttle

  It takes a fleet to build a fleet, especially because there wasn’t time to wait for mining ships in the Kuiper and Asteroid belts to bring enough raw materials to near-Earth shipyards in the months immediately following the First Formic War. Therefore every Earth-launchable shuttle became a cargo ship, lifting payloads of metal out of Earth’s gravity well. Then they unloaded their cargo into space, left it in orbit, and went back down for more.

  Cargo ships, tugs, yachts, lunar shuttles, and research vessels were pressed into service to pick up the orbiting cargo and carry it to the warship construction sites. The trouble was that there weren’t enough of them. The cargo fleet that the IF needed was already plying routes between Mars, Luna, and the Asteroid Belt, but after seeing all the near-Earth ships commandeered for cargo service, neither the Families nor the corporations would admit that they had more than a few token ships near enough to help, while the free miners set out for deeper space.

  They all understood that human survival depended on building warships to defeat the Formics, but they also knew that if the IF seized their ships, they’d never see them again. It would wipe them out, financially. They would end up stranded in some depot or station, begging for sustenance, with no hope of ever recovering from the financial loss.

  Desperate for ships, the IF began planning to send expeditions to hunt down and capture the nearest cargo ships. The first Hegemon, Ukko Jukes, put a stop to that. He instead used Hegemony funds to start the Space Vessel Repurchase Program—nicknamed Repup. The Hegemon began by retroactively purchasing all the ships that had already been seized, paying a fair market price. Only then did the Corporations and Families discover that they had far more ships nearby than they had realized. The cost of purchasing the ships was greater than the Hegemony’s entire budget, and the record suggests that Juke Limited guaranteed repayment to the banks that lent the money to fund Repup.

  Soon there were enough vessels to clear out all the huge depots of warship parts. The original crews of these ships either continued to work them under IF officers, or they took service as shipbuilders with the various corporations contracted by the Fleet to design and build new warships. According to S. P. Mu’s meticulous Index of Cargo Crews, more than 80 percent of these crews ended up enlisting in the IF before the end of the Second Formic War, and by all reports these space miners and transport crews became the backbone of the IF, training new recruits from Earth and Luna until they “got their space legs” and became accustomed to living and working safely in a zero G life-support environment.

  The dependents of the free miners who entered the IF, along with those who refused to remain on vessels commanded by IF officers, were given passage to Luna, the only planetary surface with low-enough gravity that space-dwellers could adapt and survive. The government of Luna was ill-prepared to receive them, though the Hegemony increased Luna’s food and water allotments in order to provide for the refugees. Refugee “camps”—adapted tenements and flimsy, hastily erected group shelters—were quickly established in the southern domes of Imbrium, but the delivery of food was insufficient and unreliable, while sanitation services and medical care were intermittent at best.

  If not for the efforts of the Children of Earth Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Lem Jukes, which provided newly arrived free-miner families with the necessities of life and worked to incorporate them into Lunar society within months, the Repurchase Progr
am would probably have led to mass desertions (or mutiny) by those free miners who had joined the IF and shipbuilding unions.

  Instead, these new recruits were reassured that their families were well taken care of, and they stayed on the job, producing an astonishing number of warships before large combat action began in the Second Formic War. Most of them continued after the war to build warships incorporating new designs, in order to protect Earth with a shield that no future Formic weaponry could penetrate. Even if Lem Jukes had done nothing else but set in motion this vital humanitarian effort, his place as one of the architects of human survival would be secure.

  —Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars, Vol. 3

  Bingwen stepped down from the skimmer and onto the tarmac just as the sun was coming up over the Bay of Bengal. In the low light, the surface of the ocean was a dark sparkling amber moving gently toward the shores of Wheeler Island. They were ten kilometers off the coast of eastern India on a small triangular shoal used exclusively by the International Fleet for discreet launches into space. The air smelled clean and briny, and Bingwen could hear off in the distance the faint call of a seabird. He had never seen the ocean before, and photos did not do it justice.

  This is why the Formics so desperately want this world, he thought. There is warmth and water and life here. There is food and fuel and land and the chance not just to survive, but to flourish. Bingwen allowed the cool sea breeze to envelop him as Captain Li stepped down beside him and straightened the jacket of his new blue IF uniform.

  “Savoring your last moment on terra firma?” Captain Li asked.

  “Hopefully not my last,” Bingwen said.

  The shuttle that would take them out of Earth’s atmosphere to the shuttleport in space stood on the tarmac before them. A handful of crewmen were outside it, busying themselves loading cargo and gear. The scene was a stark contrast to the highly publicized launches of the previous morning, when hundreds of Chinese soldiers sporting new IF uniforms and waving small Chinese flags had boarded shuttles and departed for Luna. They were China’s first round of committed troops to the IF, and journalists from all over the world had captured the event. But here, off the mainland, isolated from everyone, there was not a single camera in sight.