Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) (27 page)

“You’ll say more than that,” said Ketkar. “You’ll praise General Sima for his foresight, yes. But you will also call the development of the counteragent a shining example of two nations unifying under a single cause to defeat a common enemy. The whole world should emulate this pattern. We must all stand united.”

“You’re making this a political speech,” said Shenzu. “I am not a politician. Nor can I speak on behalf of my government.”

“You won’t be speaking on their behalf,” said Ketkar. “You’ll be speaking on your own behalf. As a liaison officer, as a husband, as a father to your children.”

Shenzu regarded him skeptically. “What does my family have to do with this?”

“Everything,” said Ketkar. “Their safety motivates everything you do, Captain. We know you better than you might think. We know, for example, that you are one of the Anonymous Twelve.”

Shenzu didn’t move or respond.

After an awkward silence, Mazer looked at the others and said, “Am I the only one here who doesn’t know what that means?”

Ketkar said, “The Anonymous Twelve is the name the Chinese military has given to the unknown Chinese military personnel who gave you MOPs the nuke you needed to destroy the lander. They are, in that sense, traitors to their country. Captain Shenzu here was critical in orchestrating that entire effort.”

Mazer turned to Shenzu. “Is that true?”

Shenzu took a deep breath before answering. “What I did, I did for China, its people, and my loved ones. Action had to be taken.”

“You helped get us the nuke, and then you arrested us?” said Mazer.

“I arrested you under Sima’s orders,” said Shenzu. “Well, actually he had given the arrest orders to another officer, but I intervened and requested that he give them to me instead. I wanted to ensure you weren’t harmed in the process.”

Mazer turned to Wit. “Did you know this?”

“No,” said Wit, “but I suspected.”

Shenzu faced Ketkar. “So you intend to blackmail me, Major? Is that it? If I don’t say what you want me to say and perform for the cameras, you will reveal my crime to my government and keep me from my family forever?”

“We don’t have to blackmail you,” said Ketkar. “We don’t even have to ask you to do this. You will do it because you know it’s the right thing to do. This is more than just two countries putting aside their differences for the greater good, Captain. This is the beginning of a new Earth, a new way of operating, one that can only lead to greater peace among all nations. This is what we should have done before the Formics arrived.”

Ketkar put a hand on Shenzu’s shoulder. “Now is the time, Captain. General Sima has started a movement. You can give it life. Your words could be the first intelligent approach to this disaster that anyone has heard.”

“You seem to have a very specific idea of what I should say. Is there a speech written?”

“Someone wrote one, yes. It was excellent. I told him to burn it. This has to come from you. It has to be genuine.”

Shenzu was quiet a moment. “Show me the counteragent. Then we’ll talk.”

Ketkar smiled and beckoned them to follow. “This way.”

He led them to a small structure in the center of the plaza that turned out to be a set of elevators. They climbed in, and Ketkar slid back a concealed panel and entered a code. The elevator descended.

When it stopped, they stepped out into a bright, immaculate corridor. Through the windows to their right and left, Mazer saw technicians and scientists in blue biohazard suits working with various machines, scanners, and diagnostic equipment. Ketkar kept moving, leading them deeper into the complex down a series of corridors. Finally they stepped into an observation room with a vaulted ceiling. The wall to Mazer’s left was solid glass. The room beyond it was mostly empty save for a metal table to one side atop of which sat various plastic boxes and liquid containers.

A short Indian man in his late sixties was standing in the observation room at a computer terminal. The sleeves of his blue oxford shirt were rolled up past his elbows. Gloves made of reflective sequined fabric covered his hands and forearms. His face brightened when he saw them. “Captain O’Toole. We meet again.”

“Dr. Gadhavi. A pleasure, as always.”

Gadhavi approached, and Wit introduced Mazer and Shenzu.

Gadhavi bowed. “Welcome to India, gentlemen. I am sorry we are meeting under these circumstances. Please, won’t you stand here behind this line? I’m told everyone’s ready and we can begin.”

It was only then that Mazer noticed the small cameras on the wall behind them. Other spectators would be watching apparently.

Gadhavi walked to the center of the room in front of the glass wall where a red circle was painted on the floor. As soon as he stepped in it, holoprojectors above him turned on and bathed him in a holofield. He put his back to the glass and faced them, directing his words at the cameras. “The Formic gas is a highly toxic, cell-wall-degrading enzyme solution. In principle, it’s not unlike, say, phytopathogenic fungi here on Earth, which degrade plant biomass at an alarming rate. The difference of course is its toxicity. The Formics’ gas is a thousand times worse than our nastiest fungi. It eats through lignocellulose, for example, which is often resistant to enzymatic degradation, as if it were cotton candy. And we’ve all seen what it can do to humans. It breaks down cell walls and initiates a proteolytic process that’s not unlike what our digestive system does to a bite of steak. It short, it turns biomass into gooey pulp. That’s the bad news.”

He turned around and faced the glass wall.

In the holofield, his sequined gloves twinkled in the light.

He raised his arms to the side, and two long robotic arms in the other room lowered from their recessed hiding place in the ceiling. Gadhavi walked in place, turned his head slightly to the right, and the robotic arms moved along a track in the ceiling in the direction Gadhavi indicated. The arms came to a stop at the table, and Gadhavi spread his fingers apart. The ends of the robotic arms split and separated, forming matching digits.

Using the bot arms as an extension of his own, Gadhavi lifted two sealed, liter-sized jugs off the table, carried them to the center of the empty room, and set them a distance apart on the floor.

Then he turned and faced the cameras.

“Those two containers beyond the glass wall each hold six hundred milliliters of the Formic solution, or ‘goo’ as the soldiers call it. The protein looks like this.”

A giant model of a globular protein appeared in the holofield beside him.

“As you can see, it has a very complex tertiary and quaternary structure in which the polypeptides fold around each other to essentially form a sphere. This shape is maintained by hydrogen bonds and ionic forces. Altering its shape through heat, a change in pH, or nonreversible inhibition renders the enzyme denatured, or useless. The molecular structure may be alien and unlike anything we’ve ever seen, but the laws of chemistry are universal. We may not have mastered interstellar flight, but we do know how to shake up a molecule. That’s the good news.”

He flicked his hand, and the protein disappeared. Then he turned and faced the glass wall again. He lifted his arms, maneuvered the robotic arms back to the table, and picked up a glass jar of orange liquid with a screwed top.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is our counteragent, an enzyme inhibitor, preheated to sixty degrees Celsius. When it’s fired at the goo, the heat causes some of the Formic enzymes to vibrate so violently that the delicate bonds that maintain their molecular structure are broken. The inhibitors take care of the rest, rendering the entire enzyme solution useless. But that’s not even the fun part. Once the molecule changes its shape, we can do whatever we want with it, including turning it against the Formics.”

Gadhavi moved his hands. Inside the other room, the robot arms came to life and unscrewed the lid from the jar. When they were finished, the bot arms set the jar back on the table and lifted a shotgun from a gun case. A sprayer mechanism with its own barrel adjacent to the shotgun barrel was mounted on the underside of the weapon. The bot arms picked up the jar of orange counteragent again and screwed it into the bottom of the sprayer.

Gadhavi said, “We have two objectives in China as far as the gas is concerned. One, clearing the air of what’s already been sprayed, and two, destroying the goo guns and other caches. This weapon is designed to do both. For the gas in the air, it can spray a mist.”

Inside the room, the lid popped off one of the two jugs of goo on the floor. Gas poured upward, a swirling fog of grayish green vapor.

Gadhavi got into a firing position.

In the other room, the gun unleashed a thick stream of orange mist into the cloud. When the two solutions met, the fog became a fireball that flashed bright and then snuffed out a heartbeat later, like a lit match tossed into a pan of gunpowder. The now empty jug skittered across the floor and bounced off the opposite wall.

“The other jug is like a goo tank,” said Gadhavi. “We made it with a substance of similar durability. The shotgun round has an armor-piercing slug that punctures the goo tank and releases pellets of our counteragent into the goo. Since both solutions are concentrated, the reaction is even more volatile.”

The robot arm cocked the shotgun, aimed, and fired. The jug took the round dead center and shot across the floor, spinning. One second passed. Then another. Nothing happened. Then the jug detonated like a bomb, and tiny fragments of shrapnel pinged against the glass.

Gadhavi turned around and faced them. “Since it’s orange, spicy, and cooks Formics, we’re calling the counteragent ‘Delhi Duck Sauce.’” He smiled at his own joke.

“How do we know the goo has been neutralized?” Wit asked. “You’ve demonstrated that you can create a violent reaction, but you haven’t proven that the air is clear. How do we know there aren’t lethal traces of it still in there?”

Gadhavi’s smile broadened. “Captain O’Toole. You never disappoint. Always with the tough questions. But you’re right. Pyrotechnics will not solve our problem if the counteragent doesn’t completely neutralize the goo. I couldn’t have asked for a better setup to the final portion of our demonstration.”

Gadhavi faced the glass again and made a few hand gestures in the holofield. In the demonstration room, a door slid open, and a chimpanzee stepped out into the room.

“The demonstration room has not been ventilated since I released the gas,” said Gadhavi. “The air has not been filtered in any manner. The test subject is breathing the same air that was exposed to highly lethal doses of the gas only moments ago.”

Long handrails lowered a foot from the ceiling. The chimp jumped up and grabbed them and began swinging around the room.

“Even with increased breaths and when moving to all corners of the room, the test subject remains perfectly healthy. No melting of the skin, no cell degradation. I could release a dozen more animals or people in the room with the same result. And should you require it, I can analyze the air and prove the gas is neutralized.”

For a moment, Mazer and the others were too stunned to speak.

“How quickly can you mass produce this?” asked Wit.

“The formula isn’t terribly complex,” said Gadhavi. “If we could commandeer a few chemical facilities with the right capabilities, we could make a few thousand barrels in a week. If China were to join in the effort, we would make four times that many.”

“What about the weapons and shotgun rounds?” said Shenzu. “How long would it take to mass-produce those?”

“The assault weapon is an industrial paint sprayer bolted to a shotgun,” said Gadhavi. “There’s also a heating mechanism attached to the sprayer to keep the duck sauce hot. That requires a heavy battery. Our prototype is fairly crude. The gun isn’t balanced well. We’re not weapons designers. We only made that one for the demonstration. Same with the shotgun slugs. Mass-producing those would take time, I suspect.”

“We don’t have time,” said Wit. “We need to mobilize soldiers now. If a team of scientists unfamiliar with weaponry can retrofit a shotgun, soldiers should be able to do so in their sleep. Who cares if the gun is balanced or not? It works. That’s all that matters.”

“Even if soldiers do it themselves,” said Ketkar, “we still need to supply them with detailed instructions.”

“We will,” said Wit. “MOPs made a site on the nets for sharing combat tactics with the Chinese military: stoptheformics.net. We upload the instructions there and wherever else we think the military may be looking. In the meantime, we contact every manufacturer in the world who makes a similar paint sprayer and we kick their production lines into overdrive.”

“We’ll need more than foot soldiers,” said Shenzu. “We’ll cover more ground if we retrofit military aircrafts with crop-dusting sprayers.”

“That would take time,” said Mazer. “You’d have to gut the aircraft to make room for the tanks, then build and modify the sprayers for every class of aircraft. Plus you’d need to train pilots. We could mobilize faster if we enlist aerial firefighters and seasoned crop dusters. Their planes are ready to go, and they have the needed skill. I consider myself a decent pilot, but liquid falls differently than cargo or bombs. It’s easy to overshoot or drop too early. I’d much rather have a crop duster at the stick.”

“And fire crews,” said Wit. “The chemical reaction is so volatile, we should have two to three fire crews shadowing every assault team. In fact, China should immediately begin training a quarter of its army on fire control, particularly in urban areas. If we burn cities to the ground, we haven’t done the Chinese any favors.”

Mazer nodded. “Strike teams will need flame-resistant suits over their biosuits. Something that can withstand intense flash fires. We’ll find plenty of those in heavy manufacturing and firefighter units. Maybe we ask firehouses and the private sector all over the world to donate what suits they have.”

Ketkar stepped forward. “Yes, there is much to consider. And China would be wise to involve all of you in the strategic development of the operation. But unless China agrees to troop assistance, unless we have fresh boots on the ground, we won’t make a dent in the Formics. Captain Shenzu, are you willing to face the cameras?”