Shadows in Flight, enhanced edition (5 page)

"If it's Formics, they wouldn't need one," said Ender. "The Hive Queen would know they wanted to come in and make another worker open it from the inside."

"If I breach the seal," said Sergeant, "it might cause serious damage inside."

"It's a poor design that doesn't have an airlock," said Carlotta.

"The inside door might be open," said Sergeant. "We don't know what's going on in there."

"There might be fifty heavily armed soldiers waiting to blast you when you get the door open," said Ender.

But Sergeant was already getting a pry bar from the Puppy's exterior tool rack. After a few minutes: "There's a little give, but I think the door isn't hinged. I think it slides."

Ender laughed. "Come on, you two. Think like a Formic! You're trying to open the door as if it were designed for a human to pass through. Formic tunnels are low and wide."

Sergeant muttered a few unpleasant words and then began to rerig the Puppy to pull the door in the direction the Formics would have thought of as down.

It was slow, pulling against the drag of interior machinery, but it slid open. There was an airlock, and an inner door. Sergeant closed the outer door, and opened the inner one.

The visual from Sergeant's helmet showed almost nothing, even when Carlotta enlarged it to fill the holospace.

"Switch on a light," said Ender.

"Light forward," said Sergeant, sounding annoyed. Didn't he like Ender making obvious suggestions? Poor boy.

The visual now showed a low tunnel, with tunnels branching off in a couple of directions.

"Nobody there to greet you," said Carlotta. "They're all dead."

"Or they laid a trap," said Ender. "Go on in and see."

Sergeant reacted to Ender's taunt by blanking the display.

"Hey!" protested Carlotta.

"I warned you, Ender," said the Giant.

"Why punish
me
?" demanded Carlotta.

"Come on," said Ender. "They're dead, there's no danger."

"Wrong," said the Giant.

The display came back on. It was obvious that Sergeant had indeed slid into the low tunnel. It was tall enough that Sergeant was probably sitting up.

"There was motion a moment ago," said the Giant. "While you were wasting my time with your immature behavior."

"Ender's immature behavior," said Carlotta.

"Which you just matched," said the Giant. "Sergeant is in a dangerous place and you're wasting --"

Motion in the display. Lots of motion. A dozen small creatures emerging from side tunnels and beelining toward Sergeant.

"Get out of there," said the Giant.

At once the display jiggled and swiveled nauseatingly as Sergeant threw himself feetfirst back into the airlock.

The airlock door was half closed when two of the small creatures launched themselves through the door. One went for Sergeant's body, one for his helmet. It blocked at least one of the viewers, so the image lost its depth and went flat.

"Open the airlock!" shouted Carlotta. Sergeant apparently had the presence of mind to remember where the lever was that controlled the outer door.

"Catch one and hold on to it," said Ender.

"You're a cold marubo," said Carlotta, not admiringly. But it was the right thing to do, and they both knew it.

The creature partially blocking the helmet's viewers blew away.

"I've got the one on my body," said Sergeant. "It's trying to eat through my suit."

"Get rid of it," said the Giant urgently.

"No, I'm holding it by the back now, away from me. It's just wriggling now. It's not sentient."

"How do you know?" asked the Giant.

"Because it's stupid," said Sergeant. "Quick but dumb, like a crab maybe."

"Get back to the Puppy," said the Giant.

"It's an air-breather," said the Sergeant. "Or maybe it just likes atmospheric pressure, because it finally stopped wriggling."

"Flash frozen," said Ender. "Good way to gather specimens. Except for the destruction of every cell in its body."

"We'll still be able to tell a lot about it," said Carlotta. "When he gets it back here."

"You mean
I'll
be able to tell a lot about it," said Ender.

"Are you going to keep what you find a secret from us?" asked Sergeant. "Or will we all know?"

"He's just being a brat," said Carlotta. "I don't know what's got into him."

"He's jealous because I got to do something important for once," said Sergeant.

The words stung because they were more than a little bit true.

"It looks to me," said Ender, "as if the rats have taken over the ship."

"Oh, that's too much," said Carlotta, standing up and facing Ender in a rage. "Sergeant risked his life while you sat here all cozy and --"

"Carlotta, stand down," said the Giant's voice -- over the intercom this time, instead of coming through the computer. "Ender wasn't talking about
our
ship."

Carlotta instantly understood. "So you think that creature Sergeant caught is just ... vermin?"

"Maybe it had some other function before," said Ender, "or they wouldn't have had them on their ship. But they're vermin now."

"Sergeant will be back in a minute," the Giant said, "and we have to take this creature apart and analyze it. And keep this in mind, please: Somebody or something on that ship parked it in geosynchronous orbit. Until we know who or what did that, we have no idea what kind of danger or opportunity we've run into here."

While Ender analyzed the half-exploded corpse of the alien rat-crab, Carlotta and Cincinnatus made repeated trips to the alien vessel in the Puppy. They did not return to the airlock. Instead, with Sergeant to protect her in case the ship started trying to defend itself and repel their tiny invasion, Carlotta opened all the maintenance hatches and took measurements and charted wiring and did whatever other engineering tasks were within her reach to figure out how the ship worked and, if possible, get some idea of what awaited them inside.

Both projects were getting fascinating results; Bean checked in on them every hour or so, and kept the audio channels on so that if they said anything, he could respond, just so they thought he was looking over their shoulders.

He wasn't, though. He had a project of his own. He was using the
Herodotus
's instruments and drones to probe the planet they were orbiting.

After two days of study, Ender had his report ready, and so did Carlotta and Sergeant. They gathered in the cargo hold for show and tell.

Ender began it.

"This is a Formic ship," he said. "The proteins in the rat-crab are the complete set of Formic-world proteins, with no extras.

"But here's the odd thing. The DNA is almost identical to the Formics' own genome as gathered and recorded from the many corpses after the war. There are key differences, but they're localized. It's as if the Formics went for a kind of perverse neoteny -- these rat-crabs seem to be a deliberate throwback to an earlier stage in Formic evolution, with these savage claws spliced on, and a hard carapace, which is only vestigial in the adult Formics."

Carlotta and Sergeant understood the implications at once. "So the Hive Queens can modify their own offspring," said Sergeant. "They decided that some of their babies would be those little monsters."

"I doubt they thought of them as their children anymore, if they ever did," said Carlotta. "When you have babies by the thousand, I bet the Hive Queens had no qualms about regarding a few of them as animals."

"There must be some limiting factor to their population," said Sergeant. "Or so the Hive Queen that created them intended. It might not have been the Hive Queen of this colony. They might have been developed long before this voyage and then reproduced naturally. The Formics might not even have remembered that these rat-crabs began as their kin."

"Do you think they're edible?" asked Carlotta. "Not to us, but ..."

"They're meaty," said Ender. "You're right, this might be dinner on the hoof."

"What kills them?" asked Sergeant.

"Anything. Their carapace doesn't protect them from anything stronger than the teeth of smaller animals. They could crush each other, and they could be mashed by a fist-sized rock. So you tell
us
what weapons we should use to keep them at bay."

Sergeant nodded. "No bullets, not on a ship. I wondered if we could slow them down with a sedative spray."

"I'd have to have a living specimen to see what worked on them," said Ender. "But there are sedatives that have been used on specimens of Formic-world fauna from several of the colony worlds. I could whip up a cocktail of seds that have no effect on humans."

"I just don't want to go in killing them wholesale," said Sergeant. "Now that we know they're Formic-derived, it's not impossible that they're actually the ones piloting the ship."

"Brain's too small," said Ender.

"But they might have queens," said Sergeant. "Or some kind of collective mind that's smarter than any individual. I just don't think we should go in killing. I keep thinking of the old vids of the Formics during the Scouring of China, that vile fog that reduced living creatures to pools and piles of protoplasmic goo."

"So let's have several sedatives ready that can be delivered as a fog," said Bean. "And a good solid backup plan. An acid spray, for instance. Even if they're sentient or semisentient, if they come at us to kill us, we hit them first and leave them dead."

"Carlotta?" he said. "What do we know about their ship?"

"It's definitely older tech. And it's Formic technology -- no writing, but some major color coding. Lots of little motors, which is why they need to have all these maintenance hatches. Of course they had to eliminate a lot of doorage in later ships when they got up to relativistic speeds. This design wouldn't do at all.

"I think they build the ship in space by attaching everything to an asteroid they sculpted into the shape we're seeing. Probably most of the metal in the ship's frame and hull came from the iron and nickel and such in the rest of the asteroid. But it's not the impermeable alloy they used in the ships that invaded Earth back in the 2100s."

"They didn't need it yet," said Sergeant. "At only ten percent lightspeed."

This ark showed that Formics sent out their colony ships with no defenses against attack, only a primitive collision shielding at the front. The Formics had turned out to be devastatingly formidable in war, but war was almost certainly not their intention when they came to Earth.

"Nice to know," said Bean. "Fortunately, the argument never mattered anyway. What else?"

"The huge pillars are structural -- the whole strength of the ship is vertical rising out of the rock, like a skyscraper. But they're also hollow. Rocket engines, and they carry fuel. Not radioactive, lots of carbon traces. It must be a very efficient fuel because even if the rock contains huge fuel reservoirs, it's not as if they can ever take this thing down to a planetary surface to process whatever carbon-based fuel source they use."