The Swarm: The Second Formic War by Orson Scott Card
Mazer sat in the back pew to his left, scooted in, and patted the seat next to him.
She hesitated. “People come in here to pray, you know.”
“If they do, we’ll pretend we’re praying until they leave.”
She sat beside him.
“They’re going to send me away, Kim. We both know that. Probably to the Belt. Vaganov won’t want me back at WAMRED. I’m a thorn in his side. I suspect he lost a lot of respect there because of how he discarded me. He won’t want my face around. That would aggravate the wound.”
Kim didn’t look at him. “What does that mean? This asteroid-assault-team idea of yours?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t make the decisions.”
She looked at him then. “And if you could make the decisions? What then? Would you choose to stay?”
“Of course I would stay, Kim. Do you have to ask? I can do good here. Administration isn’t my strong suit, but I can do it as well as anyone else. And I’ll ask for it. I’ll put in a request. But it won’t matter. It’s not going to happen. I’m special forces. They will put me in the field. I don’t get a choice in the matter. They own me.”
“Which is why I hate them,” she said.
“The Fleet exists because it has to, Kim. If you want to hate someone, hate the Formics. If not for them, we’d be in New Zealand right now with three kids.”
She laughed. “Three? That’s ambitious, considering how long we’ve been married. I’d be popping them out one right after another. Breastfeeding two at once, changing eighty diapers a day.”
“With the precision of a surgeon,” he said.
“You’d be changing most of those diapers, you know.”
“I wouldn’t need to,” said Mazer. “Our children will be potty trained by the time they’re three months old.”
“They can’t even crawl at three months, Mazer. They can’t reach the toilet.”
“I’d build a ramp,” said Mazer. “We’d run drills. I’d put them through a modified basic training, only focused on bathroom duties. And they wouldn’t call it peepee and poopoo either. No silliness. We’d have military names. Like Operation Thunder Bladder. They’d rappel down from the crib, do a few combat rolls across the nursery floor, take out an enemy teddy bear or two, and then charge toward the bathroom in full camo paint.”
“A baby’s skin is too sensitive for camo paint,” said Kim. “Other than that, it sounds like a plan.”
He smiled. “Our children will be brilliant, though. With you as their mother, how could they not be.”
She looked at his face, her expression serious. “Promise to be smart, Mazer. No heroics, okay? No unnecessary risks. Don’t volunteer for anything. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’ll be smart,” he said. “But I have to do what I’ve been trained to do. That’s how I’ll stay alive. If I abandon that, if I put my safety above that of my unit, I put everyone at risk, including myself.”
He took her hands. “And now I have a request for you. Don’t stay on Luna, Kim. If they send me out, get back to Earth. Some place remote. Back to New Zealand maybe. If the Formics break through, the island will be ignored for a while. Maybe forever. Maybe they won’t bother the people there at all.”
She considered that and nodded. Then she laid her head on his shoulder and Mazer held her as he watched the colored light on the wall.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked. “How long is a tour?”
“No one knows. But if they send me to the Belt, I suspect I’ll be there for a while.”
“I’m not mad at you, Mazer. I don’t want you going away thinking that’s what I’m feeling right now. What I feel is love.”
He smiled. “I wish there was a better word for love, Mrs. Rackham. What I feel for you, what you feel for me, love feels too small.”
They sat in silence for a while, simply enjoying being together, holding each other, and then Kim’s wrist pad began to vibrate. “They’re calling me back downstairs.”
“They won’t send me out immediately,” said Mazer. “I’ll see you tonight.”
They kissed and parted. Kim went downstairs. Mazer left the hospital and took a car across town to CentCom. In typical military fashion, the building was bland, unadorned, and dated. There were two stories here above the surface, but the majority of the building, like so many other agencies, was underground. Mazer wasn’t sure how far the tunnels went, but it was said that the IF had been digging and expanding since the war.
Mazer entered and passed through security. The guard who scanned him received an alert on his tablet. “Captain Rackham, I have a message here that says you are to report to LOG 41 when you arrive.”
“Thank you,” said Mazer.
LOG was short for Logistics. They were the team that organized all troop and cargo movements. LOG 41 would be cubicle 41 in the department. Mazer went to the elevators and went down four levels; then he weaved through the labyrinth that was CentCom until he reached the sea of cubicles that was the logistics department. It was a busy, bustling space, with several dozen holo conversations going on at once all around him. A huge starchart on the far wall featured an overheard perspective of the solar system, with blinking dots of lights and icons, tracking the movement of ships.
Mazer proceeded down the aisles, passing soldiers at small desks, hard at work. Some wore visors with direct links to their terminals. Everyone seemed harried and on high alert, and the mood in the room was tense. Something was happening, Mazer realized. Or about to happen.
He stopped and studied the starchart. There was nothing in the ships’ positions on the charts that suggested any organized movement; they were scattered dots of light on the display, without any pattern to them. But Mazer could sense from the energy in the room and the brief bits of chatter he was picking up as he moved about that everything was about to change.
We’re going after the Formic warships, he realized. We’re planning to divide the Fleet into two and send them above and below the ecliptic. We’re taking the fight to the Formics.
If he was right it would be a massive undertaking. There were supplies to gather, weapons to modify and prepare, crews to train, assaults and tactics and battle plans to coordinate. Plus there were issues, too. For one, there was the problem of fuel. Most of the ships got their fuel from water harvested from ice off of asteroids. But there were no asteroids outside the ecliptic. Or at least not many. There were some with crazy angled orbits, and there were comets out there as well if you knew where to find them, but recovering those asteroids and comets would be a challenge. Ships would have to follow a zigzag trajectory, moving from one comet to the next to harvest ice. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the fuel necessary to get them out there and back again.
We’re not ready, Mazer thought. We can’t penetrate the Formic hull, and if we don’t take out their ships, how can we possibly win?
He found cubicle 41 in the back corner. It was separated from the others and encased in a soundproof tube. The tube was opaque, but Mazer could see the shape of someone seated at a desk inside. He knocked, and the tube slid open, revealing a young officer at a computer terminal smiling up at him. “Captain Rackham. Won’t you have a seat?” He motioned to the empty chair across from him.
Mazer stepped in and sat down. The space was cramped. He and the officer were practically touching knees under the table. The door slid closed, and immediately the noise from outside was eliminated.
“Little loud out there today,” the officer said, still smiling.
“What’s happening?” Mazer asked. “It looks like we’re planning an offensive.”
“Oh, they’ve been planning that for quite some time now, sir. Now they’re getting the ball rolling. Please state your full name and military ID number.”
“Captain Mazer no-middle-name Rackham. 7811231002.”
The officer kept his eyes on the terminal screen. “Thank you, sir. One moment.”
“Any chance I could request a loca
“Sorry, sir. Your assignment has already been issued. You’re to report to Colonel Li at shuttledock fourteen.”
“Shuttledock? Am I to fly out immediately?”
The officer typed at his holoscreen and then looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, sir. The only information I can access here is that Colonel Li was only recently promoted. The system doesn’t tell me any more than that, including your specific assignment or your final destination. My guess is this operation is classified. Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Just follow the red line on your wrist pad.”
Mazer’s wrist pad chimed, and the floor plan of the building appeared on the viewscreen. A red line indicated the path he should take. The tube door slid open. He was being dismissed. Mazer stepped out, and the door slid closed behind him again. He followed the red path to a subway platform, where a queue of empty subway cars waited off to the side. The front car came to life as he approached, and its door slid open. Mazer stepped to the end of the platform first and looked to his right. The tunnel seemed to go on forever in that direction, and for a moment Mazer debated whether he should get in the car or not. If they were sending him to a dock, they were shipping him out, right now. He wouldn’t see Kim before this tour. He wouldn’t have a proper good-bye. The subway car stood open and waiting. Mazer had not expected this. He had assumed he would have had at least a day or two before the IF figured out what to do with him and arranged his passage. But here he was, with only the clothes on his back. He turned and regarded the door he had come through. He could go back out, but where would he go from there?
He hesitated a moment longer, then climbed into the first car and buckled the safety strap. The car slowly pulled onto the track and then shot away into the darkness.
Twenty minutes later the car pulled into a busy shuttle terminal. Mazer exited the car and took in his surroundings. IF work crews in safety uniforms were loading freight onto shuttles docked at the gates. Mazer counted ten gates, and all of them were occupied, which likely meant that a steady stream of cargo was moving out of here all day. As soon as one shuttle was full and departed, another empty shuttle took its place.
The work crews shouted orders, drove cargo lifts, honked horns of warning, and moved around each other in a frenzy. Like mechanized worker bees, each doing his part in a fast-paced frenetic system.
A honk behind Mazer caused him to jump and step quickly aside. A worker driving a cargo lift loaded with freight zipped past and nodded his thanks.
“Captain Rackham.”
Mazer turned. A thin Chinese officer approached from the other direction. He had colonel bars on his shoulders, and Mazer came to attention and saluted.
“I am Colonel Li. Welcome to TAGAT, short for Tactical Asteroid Guerilla Assault Team. Or TAG for short. The military has an acronym for everything, and we are no exception.”
“Thank you, sir. It was kind of you to come out and greet me yourself. And I’m glad to hear the IF has a solution to the asteroid problem.”
“Not a solution. An approach. And it’s one you’ve greatly influenced. We will likely be using much of the equipment you sold to Gungsu and Juke.”
So they knew about the deals, Mazer thought. He had only made them a week ago, and the IF had already seen the equipment—or the plans for it—and approved it for the field. A quick turnaround. That was optimistic.
“Whether or not our tactics will work is yet to be determined,” said Li. “We’re making this up as we go along, and we’ll continue to develop strategies en route as we move out to the Belt. But come, if we stay out here we’re likely to get run over.”
Mazer followed Li through a set of double doors to their right and through a locker room no doubt used by the loading crews.
“You probably don’t remember me,” said Li. “But we met once. Briefly. Back at Dragon’s Den, in China, the day Bingwen and the other MOPs came into the base. I was a young and cocky lieutenant trying to make a name for myself. I had a chip on my shoulder, as they say in America.”
It took Mazer a moment to place him. “I remember you, yes.”
Li smiled. “We had an awkward first meeting, Captain, but I’d like to think we’re both a little older and wiser now. I speak Common much better than I did then, for example.”
“You speak it impeccably,” said Mazer.
“The language of the IF,” said Li. “Learn it or perish. Had China been a little more cooperative from the beginning, perhaps we’d all be speaking Chinese.”
He reached another set of double doors and pushed his way through. They entered what had once been a large concrete cargo hold, perhaps a holding area for freight being shipped out in the shuttles. Now however the room served as makeshift barracks. Bunk beds lined the walls on both sides, the bedding tight and immaculate. The floor in the center of the room was covered with foam sparring pads. A dozen young men ages twelve or thirteen were paired off on the pads, conducting hand-to-hand combat exercises, tossing each other to the floor. The boy nearest the door shouted, “Officer on deck!”
The young men immediately fell into two facing lines and came to attention, motionless. Their speed and response time was impressive.
“What do you think of our little army, Captain?” asked Li.
Mazer understood at once. “You’re intending to send them into the narrow tunnels on the asteroids.”
“Of course,” said Li. “The tunnels are too big for grown men. Maybe not you, of course. You’re rather small. But even you would have trouble with most of the tunnels we’ve seen. Small boys from Southeast Asia, however, will have a much easier time maneuvering in that space. Our genetics are built for this type of work. Bingwen. Front and center.”
Mazer’s heart leaped in his chest as one of the young men in the back ran forward, a boy Mazer hadn’t yet noticed. He was older and taller and maybe even a little thinner than Mazer remembered, with his hair shaved tight to his scalp, but it was Bingwen. The boy sprinted forward without looking at Mazer and snapped to attention in front of Colonel Li, his face free of emotion. “Bingwen reporting, Colonel Li, sir.”
“Do you recognize this officer, Bingwen?” Li asked, gesturing to Mazer.
Bingwen didn’t turn his head or so much as glance at Mazer. “Yes sir, Colonel Li, sir. That is Captain Mazer Rackham, sir.”
“You know Captain Rackham well?”
“Yes sir, Colonel Li, sir. He helped me during the First Formic War, sir.”
“And Bingwen here saved my life as well,” Mazer said, smiling.
“I have not given you permission to speak, Captain Rackham,” said Li. “You will address a senior officer only when he poses a direct question. Otherwise you will request permission to speak when I am addressing another soldier. Do I make myself clear?”
Mazer raised an eyebrow. Was this a joke?
“Perhaps you are hard of hearing,” said Colonel Li. “I asked you a direct question, Captain Rackham. Your duty is to offer a direct answer.”
Mazer glanced at Bingwen. The boy hadn’t so much as blinked. What hell have they put you through? Mazer wondered. He turned back to Colonel Li. “You’ve made yourself very clear, Colonel. May I speak with you in private please?”
Colonel Li looked annoyed. There was no hard and fast rule about honoring a fellow officer’s request for private conversation, but usually officers agreed to it as a professional courtesy.
Li turned to his young army. “No one move.”
He walked out of the barracks and into a small adjacent office with glass windows. Mazer followed him inside.
Li folded his arms. “Do you have a problem with how I run my army, Captain Rackham? If you have objections, let’s hear them.”
Mazer hesitated. He was walking on thin ice here, and he strongly suspected that whatever he said would only anger Li further. “Sir, it is my understanding that the recruitment and use of ch
“You are a poor student of history,” said Li. “Children have taken a direct part in war for centuries. Soldiers, spies, messengers, lookouts. Name a country, and I will cite to you the wars and rulers who have employed child soldiers. The list is long and may surprise you, and it includes those nations of the West who consider themselves above reproach, nations who scorn the rest of the world for the practice when they themselves are guilty of the act. Look at the Romans, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, both world wars, the American Civil War, Africa, the Middle East; from the moment man first raised a spear to defend his campfire, we have been employing children in war.”
“Yes, but that does not make the practice morally acceptable, sir. I’d like to think we’re a little more civilized now than we were during the wars you mention.”
Li laughed. “Civilized? When has war ever been civilized, Captain? War, by its very definition, is barbaric and horrific and the very antithesis of civility.”
“All the more reason to protect children from it,” said Mazer.
“You surprise me, Captain. I was told you had strategic prowess, that you had an innate ability to tackle difficult obstacles with a mind open to nonconventional tactics. I see now that such praise was mistaken.”
“The additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions states that no one under the age of fifteen can be recruited or participate in armed conflict,” said Mazer. “Are we ignoring the Geneva Conventions now?”
“Tell me, Captain. When they sat down around the tables in Geneva over a century ago, did they know about the Formics? Did they know that an alien race would one day seek to melt the flesh from our bones with biochemical weapons designed to destroy all biota on Earth? Did these military commanders, these wise men—who you clearly consider the only people in the history of the world capable of making moral judgments on our behalf—did they see what we would face? Did they know the threat that was coming? And perhaps more importantly, would they have made an exception to their own ethics if failing to do so meant the annihilation of our species? Because that’s the question here, Captain Rackham. That’s the cold hard ugly truth of the matter. If we lose, there will be no children. None. No infants, no toddlers, no preschoolers, no kids blissfully running around the playgrounds of Earth. They will each be a bloody stain and pile of bones if we don’t win.