Earth Awakens

by Orson Scott Card

  He had rented a small office at one of the public docks on Luna. The room number had been included on the post. The interviewing wasn't supposed to begin for another half hour, but there was no need to keep everyone waiting. The office was bare except for a small wooden table--scratched and worn from decades of use--and two metal chairs.

  The first applicant claimed to be eighteen years old, but he looked fourteen at the most.

  "Have you ever installed a D-class laser or one of higher grade?" Victor asked.

  "No, sir. But we had D on our ship."

  "What ship was that?"

  "Hermes's Wings. The Greek Greats Clan. Do you know the one?"

  Victor shook his head. "Where's your ship now?"

  The boy was holding his hat in his hands. He looked down at it and wrung it nervously. "Gone, sir. Battle of the Belt."

  "You don't have to call me 'sir.' How is it that you survived?"

  The boy wouldn't look him in the eye. "The morning we decoupled from the depot and set out, I ... uh, I missed the ship, sir."

  His family wouldn't have left him behind. He had probably run away when they docked, knowing they would soon set off to war. Victor felt sorry for the kid, but he wasn't offering jobs out of sympathy, especially to anyone who would abandon his family. Still, the kid needed work the same as anyone. "I can't promise you they'll hire you, but there's a Juke ship called the Valas. A cargo freighter. They may be looking for hands. I know the captain. You can tell her I sent you."

  The boy scoffed. "Work for a corporate? Never."

  "Those days are over," said Victor. "Free miners and corporates, we work together now. That is, unless you want to go hungry."

  The boy's expression fell, humbled. "I beg your pardon, sir. Very grateful for the help. Yes, I'll visit the Valas. Very kind."

  Victor gave him the information and sent him on his way. The other applicants came in one by one, but none of them fared much better than the first. Some were in their sixties. Another kept coughing throughout the interview as if he had some upper-respiratory disease. Several were fathers and husbands and asked if they could bring their wives and children along. Victor took their information and told them he'd contact them if they got the job. The truth was, he needed husbands for the survivors of El Cavador as much as he needed mechanics. If they were going to be a thriving family again, some of the women would have to remarry. He couldn't say that on the job posting, however. Wanted: Handsome men of honest disposition willing to marry one of eighteen widows and adopt all of her children. Spanish speakers preferred.

  He was beginning to despair after hours of interviews when Imala came into the room.

  "Imala. I've been calling you for days, ever since I left the clinic. I must have left half a dozen messages."

  "I've had a lot on my mind." She sat in the chair opposite him.

  He didn't know what to say. "It's great to see you. I want to see you. But ... I'm in the middle of something. I'm interviewing people. But maybe I could get another chair. You could help me. I'd like to know what you think."

  "I'm here for the interview, Vico."

  "What? You mean you're applying?"

  "That's what an applicant does. She applies. She gets interviewed. Hopefully she gets a job."

  "You want the job?"

  "This isn't a difficult concept to grasp, Vico. You're offering a job. I need a job."

  "Yes, but ... you want to come?"

  "I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to come, Vico."

  "But I'm going to the Belt, Imala. That's far out there."

  "I know how far it is. We went once before, remember?"

  "I'll be going much farther than that, Imala. And once we get out there, it won't be easy to get back. This isn't auditing. This isn't a desk job. It's mining."

  "You think I can only handle desk jobs?"

  "No, of course not. You can do anything. That's my point. This is grunt work. You've got a college degree, real-world experience. A reference from Lem, and you could work wherever you wanted. Luna, Earth. The International Fleet would take you in a hot second. The Hegemony would as well if anyone other than Ukko Jukes was running the show."

  "So you don't want me to come?"

  "Of course I want you to come. But ... I can't ask that of you. You have a future, Imala. The Belt is the last place in the system to find opportunities."

  "Maybe I don't want opportunities, Vico. Maybe I want something else."

  He was quiet a moment. "What do you want, Imala?"

  "To be happy, Vico. I want to be happy."

  *

  They left three days later on a cargo ship. Victor didn't end up hiring anyone other than Imala. He'd wait until they reached the Belt, where he might find better applicants. Or perhaps Imala was right. Maybe he didn't need to hire anyone else. Maybe he and Imala and the women of El Cavador could do it all.

  "Arjuna has crewmen as well," Imala told him. "This is a partnership, remember? He'll want to invest laborers, too."

  Victor frowned. "I still can't get used to that idea. These people aren't my family."

  "No, but they took your family in. That counts for something."

  One week into the trip, the captain came to call on them. "Mr. Delgado, Ms. Bootstamp, would you please follow me to the cargo hold?"

  Victor and Imala exchanged glances and flew with the captain to the hold. "I'm instructed to give you this holo," said the captain, handing Victor a holopad.

  "From who?" asked Victor.

  The captain smiled and flew off, leaving them alone. The hold was brimming with equipment. All of the bays were packed tight with parts and supplies. Victor turned on the holofield, and Lem Jukes's head appeared. "Hello, Victor. By the time you get this message, you'll be a week into your voyage. I'm not one for longwinded apologies, or any type of apology for that matter, but I owe you one. You and Imala both. I wasn't always as honest or forthcoming as I should have been. I know you still harbor some deep resentment toward me, and I can't say I blame you. Some of my decisions have been inexcusable. I can't make up for those mistakes, but what I can do I will. You will find on this ship everything you and your family needs to retrofit your mother's salvage ship. The captain has a full inventory. I made it as comprehensive as I could. Giving you a completely new mining ship would have been less expensive, but knowing you, I worried you might not take it. So don't salvage crappy parts from derelict ships. That's a recipe for disaster. Take these new ones and save yourself a lot of heartache. You can still have the pleasure of installing them all yourself. And since they're already loaded and you can't turn back, you have no choice but to take them. You'll find quickships, two A-class lasers, suits, helmets, wearable diggers, smelters, hand tools, nav equipment. You're pretty much set for life. If you're going to do this, you might as well do it right. Best of luck."

  The message ended. Lem's head winked out. Victor stared at the empty holofield for a long moment. Then he looked up at Imala and began to laugh.

  Epilogue

  Edimar sat at the bay window of the Gagak and went over the data a final time. She checked and rechecked, calculated and recalculated. Then, when she was certain there were no errors, she went to the helm to find Rena.

  The past several weeks had been hectic. Now that the war was over, pirates that had gone dormant were now out in full force. Or maybe they never had gone dormant. Maybe they had continued to raid ships all this time, and it was only because of the interference that nothing had been reported. Either way, a day didn't go by without another report or two coming in. Families killed, ships stripped and gutted. The most notorious of these was a vulture named Khalid. He was a Somali, like Arjuna, and the two of them had some history, though Edimar had never been brave enough to ask what.

  Rena had implored Arjuna to increase the ship's shielding, and the two of them had had a rather heated discussion on the subject in the corridor. Rena had suggested adding more metal plates to the hull.

  "And where am I to find these
plates, Lady?" Arjuna had said.

  "Wherever you can," Rena had said. "You could start with the walls between cabins."

  "You want me to rip out walls? Take rooms away from my crew?"

  "You'd be making one big room out of two rooms. They would still have the same amount of space."

  "Yes. And zero privacy. How are my men and women to love each other if they share a room with twenty people?"

  "Well, Arjuna, let's prioritize here. What's more important to you? The safety of this crew or having everyone gratify their sexual desires?"

  "That is easy for you to say," he had said. "You are a woman without a husband."

  "And therefore I have no desires? For a man who has three wives, Arjuna, you know next to nothing about women."

  In the end Arjuna had closed himself in his room and roared in frustration so loudly that Edimar had heard him all the way back in the cargo bay. That's where she had been spending much of her days recently, holopad in hand, combing the archives of the Parallax Nexus. Now she had the answers, and she was desperate to show Rena.

  She found her in the helm at the nav charts. "I need to speak with you. Immediately."

  Rena followed her out into the corridor. "You look upset. What's wrong?"

  "The Formic mothership. The one Victor destroyed. It wasn't a mothership at all."

  "What do you mean?" said Rena. "Of course it was."

  "I've been digging through the archives at Parallax. When you look outward, Ukko could have found the ship years ago. If the satellites had been programmed to identify movement like that, we would have had years to prepare."

  "We wouldn't have known what it was," said Rena.

  "We would've known it was extraterrestrial. We could've prepared for the worst. That would have been better than getting caught with our pants down."

  "Don't use that phrase," said Rena. "It sounds vulgar. Why does this upset you?"

  "Because when you look out even farther, you can see when the ship separates from something much, much bigger. This mothership that Victor destroyed, it was a scout ship, Rena. The real mothership is still out there."

  Rena stared at her. "How certain are you?"

  "A hundred percent. The data's irrefutable. Eight years ago the scout ship broke away from the mothership. But we saw it four years ago when the light reached us. The scout ship continued its speed at roughly half the speed of light while the mothership began to decelerate. The scout ship eventually decelerated also, but not until much later. So it reached us first. The mothership is now coming at about ten percent of the speed of light, but it is coming, Rena. I played with the data a hundred times. I tested myself. I looked at this from every angle, and I'm telling you, I know I'm right."

  Rena said nothing for a long moment. "How much time do we have?"

  "Five years. But that's not what scares me the most. This mothership is changing."

  "Changing? How?"

  "At first I thought it was breaking apart or something, but the pieces don't move like wreckage. They have order. They move like ships."

  "I don't understand."

  "The mothership is cannibalizing itself, Rena. It's taking itself apart to create lots and lots of smaller ships. It's transforming itself into a fleet. An army. And I think it's safe to say they're not intending to apologize. I'm glad we stopped this war. I'm glad it's over. But we have a much bigger problem coming."

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are two names on the cover of this book, but a small army of people made it possible. Thanks to Kathleen Bellamy for all her careful assistance. Thanks also to everyone at Tor for their encouragement and skill and expertise, particularly our editor, Beth Meacham, whose input is always wise and inspired. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Phillip Absher, for his careful reading of the manuscript and for catching mistakes you will thankfully never see. Thanks also to Amy Saxon, Jordan D. White, Aisha Cloud, Andy Mendelsohn, and Jeanine Plummer. You all know how you helped, and we love you for it. We owe a big muchas gracias to Jorge Guillen, who gave advice on some of the Spanish phrases used in the previous two volumes and whom we failed to mention last time. Adelante, amigo.

  Lastly, we thank our wives, Kristine Card and Lauren Johnston, the captains of our two ships. They are our first readers and our truest friends, and without their encouragement and counsel and good humor, this book would not exist. Marry well, dear reader, and your mana will never drain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ORSON SCOTT CARD is the New York Times bestselling author of Ender's Game. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine, and their youngest child.

  AARON JOHNSTON is a New York Times bestselling author, comic book writer, and screenwriter. He is the coauthor, with Orson Scott Card, of Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Invasive Procedures. He and his wife are the parents of four children.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  EARTH AWAKENS

  Copyright (c) 2014 by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by John Harris

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Card, Orson Scott.

  Earth awakens / Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston.--First Edition.

  p. cm.

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book."

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2906-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-42994881-4 (e-book) 1. Space warfare--Fiction. I. Johnston, Aaron. II. Title.

  PS3553.A655E36 2014

  813'.54--dc23

  2013033239

  e-ISBN 9781429948814

  First Edition: June 2014

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