Earth Unaware

by Orson Scott Card

  Yes, thought Victor. Land on its surface. How simple. Just plop a quickship—which was never intended to be piloted, never intended to hold people at all, and operated with rudimentary flight controls—onto a moving alien target. Easy.

  Victor watched the pod approach. It decelerated as it sunk into the debris cloud, yet it still moved faster than Victor thought safe for a debris field. It must be incredibly nimble, he thought. It must be able to shift direction quickly. And just as he considered this, it happened. The pod jinked and spun to avoid a chunk of debris and then returned to its previous trajectory with inhuman agility. Again, like a flying insect, zipping to the side and back with ease. How was he supposed to land on something that could change direction that fast?

  Ten seconds passed. The pod drew closer, getting larger. For a harrowing moment, Victor thought it was coming directly for them, that it had seen them moving through the debris and decided to attack them instead. But no, now it slowly began to veer to the side. They were beside its trajectory, not on it.

  Finally it passed by, not a hundred meters from their position, slick and smooth and moving fast.

  Victor slid his finger down the screen of his handheld, and the quickship shot forward. Earlier he had devised a dial to increase the propulsion by simply sliding his finger across the screen, but as soon as the ship took off, he knew that he had misjudged it: They were accelerating too quickly. He had intended to start slow and then rush at the end, but it was too late for that now. He would have to rely on retros to slow them down in the final moments just before impact.

  The quickship raced forward, not aiming at the pod, but at a point in space ahead of it, where Victor hoped the two ships would meet. He had to hit it right, he knew. If he came late, they might fly up into the pod’s rear thrusters, burning themselves up in whatever heat or radiation was emitted there. Too early and they’d put themselves directly in the pod’s path, only to be crushed by the subsequent collision. It was the middle of the pod or nothing. And not at too sharp an angle either or they’d only bounce off or, worse, collide with such force that they’d kill themselves instantly.

  Victor kept his eyes focused on the point of interception. The pod was to his right, slightly ahead of them. They were too fast, he realized. He was going to overshoot.

  “We’re coming in hot,” he said. “Hold on to something.”

  He fired up the retros to a quarter power. The straps across his chest tightened as he felt his body pressed forward in sudden deceleration. Then just when he thought he had slowed them enough, he released the retros, hit the propulsion, and they shot forward again. Victor waited one more moment then killed the propulsion. Now they were in a fast dead drift, closing in on the ship.

  Three more seconds. Then two. One.

  The impact was hard, and Victor’s body jerked against the straps. He hit the propulsion again to keep them from bouncing off, but he could already feel the ship deflecting away. He saw Father’s body fly by, and for an instant Victor thought Father had been thrown from the ship. But no, Father had launched forward, using the speed and force of the impact to get clear of the quickship, and hurled himself onto the pod. Two cables uncoiled behind him, and Father raised the hook in his hand. He hit the surface of the pod and snapped the hook around the base of one of the long grappling arms. His body flipped around, still full of momentum; and it would have flown off into space if not for the cable attached to his safety harness, which snapped taut and whipped him back to the surface of the pod.

  The cable attached to the hook snapped taut next, and the quickship swung back to the pod like a pendulum, slamming hard against the side of the pod. For a moment, Victor felt dazed and disoriented, then he tore at his restraints, pulling himself free, crawling out. He set his boot magnets to the hull and was relieved to feel them attracted to the metal. Toron was right behind him, magnet pads in his hands, crawling out onto the pod with two hydraulic shears strapped across his back.

  Victor grabbed the heat extractor, and crawled forward. Toron was right beside him. Debris whipped by overhead. They reached Father. Toron handed Father one of the shears, and Father immediately went to work, firing up the hydraulics. They had aimed for the drills, but Father was attached to a grappling arm, and he set the shears to work there first. The teeth bit at the metal but they didn’t sink in. He tried again, setting the teeth at a different angle, but again to no effect.

  “I can’t bite through,” said Father. “The metal’s impermeable.”

  “What do we do?” said Toron.

  “Vico, get the heat extractor here at the base of this grappling arm,” said Father. “We’ll suck the heat off of it. Freezing it will make it brittle.”

  Victor moved quickly, attaching the claw of the heat extractor around the narrow grappling arm. Then he watched the meter as the heat of the arm quickly dropped.

  After ten seconds, Father said, “Good enough. Take it off.”

  Victor snapped the claw free, and pulled the extractor away. Father was instantly at the frozen spot with the shears again. This time the shears bit through, but instead of tearing, the metal cracked, splintered, and then shattered. The entire grappling arm snapped free and hovered there in space a moment before Father pushed it away from the ship.

  One arm down. Three to go. Plus the drills.

  “That one next,” said Father, indicating the grappling arm two meters to their right. Victor began crawling for it, following Father, sliding his knee magnets across the smooth surface, keeping himself low and his grip on the pod secure. A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision stopped him. He turned toward the nose of the pod and saw a hatch open. A figure emerged wearing a pressure suit and helmet. It wasn’t human. It was three-quarters the size of a human, with a double set of arms and a pair of legs. All six appendages stuck to the surface as the creature shuffle-crawled forward with incredible speed, racing toward them, an air hose trailing behind it.

  Victor couldn’t move. His whole body was rigid with fear.

  The thing paused, lifted its head, and regarded them. Victor saw its face then. It wasn’t an insect exactly—there was skin and fur and musculature. But it was antlike. Large black eyes. Small mouth, with pincers and protuberances like teeth. Two superciliary antennae that bent downward across its face.

  “Son hormigas,” said Toron. They’re ants.

  The creature moved its head, eyeing their equipment. Then, seeing that Victor had the largest piece, the heat extractor, and perhaps the most threatening, the hormiga shot forward toward Victor with its first set of arms raised.

  Victor cried out. And just before the arms seized him, the blunt end of a pair of shears struck the hormiga on the side of the head, knocking it away. It was Toron. “Help your father! I’ll hold it back.”

  The creature slid away and then tumbled off the ship, spinning into space. Its air hose snapped taut and held firm, however, and as soon as the hormiga got its bearings, it shimmied up the hose like it was climbing a pole and was back on the surface of the pod. Toron hurried to the hose and severed it with a quick snip of the shears. Air poured from the hose, and the creature lunged at Toron, pinning him to the surface.

  Victor moved to intercede, but Father was quicker, crawling past him and lunging at the creature. “Get the extractor on that grappling arm,” Father yelled. “Now!”

  Victor moved for the arm and snapped the claw around the base of it. He cranked the setting up to maximum and pulled out as much heat as he could. He looked back to Father and Toron and saw that the creature was gone, knocked off the ship by one of them. Toron was on his back, his knee magnets turned around to the back of his legs, holding his lower body against the hull. Father was kneeling over him, clinging to the stomach of Toron’s suit.

  “Victor. Help me,” said Father.

  Victor hurried over and saw at once that Toron was badly wounded. The front of Toron’s suit over his abdomen was ripped and bloody. Father was trying desperately to hold the punctured suit close
d. Toron was coughing up blood into his helmet, and his eyes weren’t focused.

  “What do I do?” said Victor.

  “We need to seal the suit,” said Father. “Hurry.”

  Victor tore at his hip pouch for the tape.

  Every suit had a fail-safe system inside it in case of a puncture: Straps would tighten and rings of airtight foam would inflate inside the suit to seal off the punctured area and prevent an oxygen leak. Without these emergency sealants, you’d quickly lose all air pressure and die in fifteen to thirty seconds. The problem was, the seals were never perfect. Air always seeped out, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but air always found a way. If anything, the sealants were designed to give you a few extra minutes at most to get back inside the ship before you asphyxiated or your body fluids began to boil. Tape could help seal the puncture if the hole was small enough, but it wasn’t the golden solution, especially on a puncture as big as Toron’s.

  Victor found the tape and hit the mechanism on the side to eject a foot-long strip of adhesive.

  “Put it here,” said Father, “where my fingers are. Hurry.”

  The suit was red and wet, and the tape wasn’t sticking because of the fluid.

  “We have to stop the bleeding first,” said Victor. “We have to put pressure on the wound.”

  “He’s losing air,” said Father.

  “He’ll bleed to death if we seal the suit,” said Victor.

  A hand grabbed Victor’s arm. It was Toron, looking up at him. “You find my daughter. You keep looking. You make sure I don’t die in vain.”

  “You’re not going to die. We’re going to get you back,” said Victor, though he knew it wasn’t true.

  Toron tried to smile. “Don’t think so.”

  “Put your hand on the wound and hold it there,” Father said to Victor. “I’ll try to seal your hand inside the suit.”

  Toron turned his head to Father. “Always trying to fix things, eh, cousin? This one’s even beyond you.” He coughed again, and winced, then gasped from the pain of it. Father held his hand. The pain passed, and when Toron spoke again his voice was strained and weak. “Save the ship. Save Lola and Edimar. Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” said Father.

  “I was hard on Edimar. I was a bad father.”

  “Stop talking,” said Father gently.

  Toron winced again.

  Father handed Victor the shears. “Cut the grappling arm.”

  Victor hesitated. He didn’t want to leave Toron.

  “Do it now, Vico,” said Father.

  Victor moved, crawling across the surface. He pulled the claw of the heat extractor away. The metal was cracked and brittle. Victor turned on the shears, and the second grappling arm snapped away.

  “Don’t stop,” said Father. “Take out one of the needle drills next. No matter what happens, keep going. Break off as much as you can.”

  A second figure emerged from the hatch. Father had the other pair of shears in his hand. He rushed the creature, staying low, jabbing the shears forward. Victor reached the drill. It was narrower than the arm. He snapped the claw around it and waited for the heat extractor to do its work, sucking the heat away. Victor glanced to the side and saw Father fighting the creature. Father kept lunging with the shears, but the creature was easily swatting the attacks aside. If Victor didn’t help, the creature would soon get the upper hand.

  Victor glanced back at the extractor. It was done. Victor quickly removed the claw and snipped with the shears. The drill snapped free, and Victor pushed it away before glancing again at Father. The creature was off the ship, dangling in space at the end of its hose, not moving, its body mangled from the shears. Father crawled forward and snipped the hose, severing the creature from the ship.

  “Are you hurt?” asked Victor.

  Father sounded winded. “No. Keep going.”

  Victor went to the next drill. Froze it. Snipped it. Pushed it away.

  They were approaching El Cavador. Victor could see it far ahead in the distance. Father was at the hatch, looking inside. It was a small hole, too narrow for his shoulders. “There’s another one inside,” he said.

  Father reached in with the shears. There was a struggle. Father’s arms jerked right and left. The creature had incredible strength, and for a moment Victor feared that the magnets anchoring Father to the surface of the ship would break their hold and Father would be slung out into space.

  But the magnets held, and Father continued to lunged downward, fierce and fast.

  Finally the struggling stopped. Father exhaled, coughed, and sounded exhausted. “It’s dead,” he said. He shined a light down into the hole. “I think this is the cockpit. I don’t see any other way to get into this room except through this hatch. No doors. No access points. I think these three were the entire crew.”

  Victor crawled toward him. “We have to stop it if we can. Do you see any controls?”

  “I see a lot of levers and dials. And a few screens, but they only display images. There’s no data. No writing, no symbols, no instructions, nothing that suggests measurement or coordinates or directions. No language marks or symbols. Nothing. I wouldn’t know how to stop it.”

  Victor reached him and looked inside. The creature was snipped in half, floating in the air, limp and oozing liquid. Victor averted his eyes, suddenly hit with a wave of nausea. He shined his light toward the flight console instead, which was a ring around the front window, filled with dozens of levers and switches.

  “We need to widen this hole,” said Victor. “I’ll freeze it with the heat extractor. You cut behind me as I move around the circle.” He reached down and pinched the inner ring of the hatch with the claw of the heat extractor then slowly slid the claw along the inner ring. Father followed behind with the shears, cutting and cracking the metal away. They worked quickly, and when they were done, the hole was more than wide enough for the both of them to float inside. Victor pushed the creature aside with the claw of the heat extractor and flew down to the console. The levers varied in size and shape, but there was nothing to indicate their purpose. No markings, words, numbers, nothing. Some of the levers would no doubt be for the drill and grappling arm while others must be for the engines. But which ones? Victor looked around him, searching for clues. The room was large and filled with equipment. There were long tubes of smoky gases and odd-looking plants. The screens showed images of the Milky Way, the solar system, and a slightly blurry image of a planet.

  “That’s Earth,” said Father.

  Victor thought so, too. “Yet there’s no data,” said Victor. “No labeling, no markings of any kind. Just images. Are you recording all this?”

  Father scanned the room. “Trying to.”

  Victor focused his attention back on the console, searching for any symbols or markings that might suggest the purpose of any of the levers. It was useless, he realized. There was nothing to guide him.

  “Trouble,” said Father, pointing.

  Victor followed Father’s finger and looked out the window. The pod was heading toward a large piece of wreckage a kilometer or two ahead.

  “We don’t know how to stop it,” said Father. “We need to bail.”

  “Give me a second,” said Victor, reaching for one of the levers. He pulled back, and one of the grappling arms extended out in front of them.

  “We don’t have time, Vico.”

  “We need to save this ship, Father. There might be information here.”

  The debris was approaching. The ship would collide in moments. Victor studied the levers. There were three other levers like the one he had tried. Those would all be grappling arms; not what he wanted.

  “We need to go now,” said Father.

  Victor tried another lever, and the ship accelerated slightly.

  “Whoa,” said Father.

  Victor pulled back in the other direction, and the ship slowed. But not enough.

  “Pull it back more,” said Father.

  “That’
s as far as it goes.”

  They were nearly on top of the debris. It was at least four times the size of the pod, with twisted beams and mangled steel protruding from every direction, all coming clearly into view fast. Father grabbed Victor’s hand. “Move. Now!”

  Victor launched up through the hole and crawled out onto the hull. Father came up behind him. The shadow of the debris covered the pod. They were seconds from impact.

  “We need to jump,” Father said. “Take off your line.”

  Victor fumbled with the D-ring on his safety harness. His fingers slipped. He couldn’t get it lose.

  Snip. The shears in Father’s hands cut the line. “Go!”

  They launched upward. Victor looked back. The pod crashed into the debris below them. Beams from the debris pierced the cockpit window. Glass shattered and twinkled away into space. The quickship flew forward, spinning awkwardly, still tethered to the pod, and careened into the debris, bending, bouncing off, wrecked. Dust and tiny debris scattered in every direction, clouding the collision.

  “El Cavador. El Cavador,” Father was saying. “Do you read? Over.”

  The wreckage was getting smaller below them. They were still flying upward with the force and speed of their launch. They weren’t tethered to anything. They had nothing in hand to stop themselves. Father was off to Victor’s right, with the distance growing between them by the second. They had launched at slightly different angles, and now they were drifting farther apart. Unless El Cavador retrieved them immediately, they would fly in these directions at these speeds forever.

  “El Cavador,” Father said again. “Can you read?”

  There was a crackle over the line, then Concepción’s voice said, “Segundo. We see you. We’re coming for you now.”

  Victor looked back and saw El Cavador emerge from behind a section of debris.

  “Get Vico first,” said Father.

  “We’re getting you both,” said Concepción.

  Victor turned his head back to Father, who was a great distance away now, getting smaller by the moment.