Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) (40 page)

He glanced down at Bingwen and smiled. “You’re angry with me. Your little face is a mask, but I know you’re angry.”

Bingwen said nothing.

“I didn’t give you a chance to say good-bye. You think I abandoned them.”

Bingwen kept his head bowed, submissive. “You did what you thought was best, Lieutenant Li, sir.”

“And you disagree?”

“You are my commanding officer. It is not my place to disagree.”

Li laughed. “You learn quickly, boy. But come now, I give you permission to speak freely. Out with it. No punishment will come to you regardless of what you say.”

Bingwen knew that was a lie. Li may not him give him demerits, but he would resent Bingwen if Bingwen spoke his mind. No, silence was better.

After a moment, Li released Bingwen’s hand. “I’ve made you too cautious, I see. Very well. I order you to speak, boy. A soldier who doesn’t think for himself is of no use to his army.”

Bingwen chose his words carefully. “You did not want to make a scene. A long farewell could lead to tears, objections. A swift separation was best. People were waiting to board. Emotions were high. To warn us ahead of time would have complicated their departure.”

Li nodded, content. “A good officer must what do what is prudent, boy. Never what is convenient. I did not give you warning because in war, warnings rarely come. Will the Formics warn us of an attack? Will they send us a holo before they swoop in and gas us? Never.”

We’re not Formics, Bingwen wanted to say. We’re humans. We can still be decent. We can still be kind. But aloud he said nothing.

“Let this be a lesson to you, boy. To coddle the weak is to weaken them further. Will you hold your soldiers’ hands in battle? Will you kiss their booboos and tell them there are no such thing as monsters? Because there
are
monsters now, Bingwen. Real monsters. Monsters who will come in the night and cut your stomach wide open and play with your insides. You do your soldiers a great disservice by treating them like delicate glass bowls. Those children are young, yes, but a lesson in pain will strengthen their resolve. Fear is the medicine they need. That is how you keep soldiers sharp and alive. To be kind, to be gentle, is to lie. That lowers their guard. To be their friend is the most destructive thing a commander can do.”

Bingwen almost stopped walking then. If this was the military, if this was how they expected him to treat people, he wanted no part of it.

He glanced to his left; the exit was twenty meters away. If he ran now, if he squeezed through that turnstile and made for the doors, he might get outside and disappear in the crowds before Li could grab him.

But then Bingwen remembered the faces beyond the fence. Their fear, their desperation. They knew the Formics were moving north.

No, Bingwen couldn’t run. Not yet. Li was his ticket out of the fighting zone. If he wanted to ditch later he could. For now his only choice was to follow and obey and hope that Niro and Pipo would forgive him.

Li led them to the end of a platform, where they descended a short ladder to the ground and headed north into the train yard. They followed one of the magnet tracks. Bingwen could hear it humming with current, and he wondered what would happen if he stepped onto its wide metal surface.

Every twenty meters or so, there was a spacer in the tracks made of thick black rubber, where they crossed, moving west through the train yard. Soon they came to a short side track where a row of maintenance cars was waiting. Soldiers stood guard, and they checked Li’s credentials. Then the chief officer tapped his wrist pad, and one of the maintenance cars floated forward on the track. It was a small, roofless two-passenger car, with a bed in the back for tools and supplies.

“Get in,” said Li.

Bingwen climbed aboard, and Li did likewise, tapping his wrist pad with the front console. The car shot forward on the track, smooth as glass, moving of its own accord. It changed tracks at a few switches and then cut west across the northern part of Chenzhou, putting the train yard behind them.

There was evidence that Chenzhou had been a thriving city recently. But now the roads were empty and the factories were still and silent. Tall, concrete apartment complexes appeared vacant and abandoned.

“There was a volunteer evacuation three weeks ago,” said Li. “Most people left then. Those who stayed behind had nowhere to go in the north, or maybe they had never been anywhere else and were afraid to leave. Either way, it’s mandatory now. That’s who you saw at the station. The stragglers. The foolish. Let that be a lesson as well. When an order is given, you better obey it.”

“Permission to pose a question, Lieutenant Li, sir?”

“Ask.”

“Will the trains keep running until everyone is safe?”

“Some will get out. Most won’t. The trains will stop soon. We can’t afford to let them become contaminated. The people left behind will have to make do.” He smiled at Bingwen. “So you see, I saved your friends’ lives. I’m not as cruel as you think.”

You put them on a train as you were ordered to do, thought Bingwen. You did the minimum required of you. You were cruel when you could have been kind.

Aloud he said, “Thank you, Lieutenant Li, sir.”

The track turned north, and Chenzhou was suddenly behind them. Bingwen began to wonder where they were going. Surely they weren’t taking a maintenance car all the way north.

After a few hundred meters, the trees and vegetation began to thicken into dense forest. Bingwen inhaled deep. The wind in his face was cool and clean. It carried the smells of greenery and earth and a coming rain. Bingwen had almost forgotten the world could smell this way—free of the stench of death and smoke and rotted vegetation. It made him think of the fields of home, of the way the cool mud would squeeze between his toes as he worked alongside Father in the paddies. It made him think of Mother, of how she would scold him one moment and then take him into her arms and laugh with him the next. It made him think of Hopper and Grandfather and running through the fields in the morning before sunrise so he could get more study time on the computers.

All of that was in this smell, the smell of China, of freedom, of home.

Ahead was a checkpoint. The car stopped at the gate. A soldier looked over Li’s credentials and waved them through. Half a kilometer later they reached the military depot. The train was so long that Bingwen couldn’t see where it ended. Soldiers were everywhere on the two platforms on either side, loading equipment and supplies. Pallets of food, blankets, medicine—enough to fill a city.

Li parked the maintenance car on a side track and then led Bingwen up onto one of the platforms. They weaved their way among workers, heading toward the front of the train. Li paused at a pallet of food and opened a box, coming away with two MREs.

By the time they reached the end of the platform and boarded the train, Bingwen had worked up a sweat. They found an empty passenger car near the front and sat facing each other.

Li tossed Bingwen an MRE. “Eat.”

Bingwen peeled back the wrapper and bit into the wafer. It tasted like pork and cheese.

“Permission to pose a question, Lieutenant Li, sir?”

Li rolled his eyes. “I’m beginning to regret teaching you that. It’s annoying.” He bit into his wafer. “What?”

“Why do the Formics leave our nonaggressive aircrafts alone?”

“You don’t have a theory?”

“Yes, but it’s based on little information.”

“Let’s hear it anyway.”

“Back at my village, we would sometimes get these gnats. They’d buzz around in small swarms over the paddies, hovering in place and not really bothering us. Normally we would ignore them. But if you weren’t paying attention and walked into their swarm, they’d get in your face and bite you.”

“So the Formics are gnats.”

“No,” said Bingwen, “
we’re
the gnats. I think the Formics leave the nonaggressive aircraft alone because they don’t consider us a threat until we start biting. As soon as we get in their face, they realize we’re there and brush us aside. Otherwise, we’re insignificant to them.”

“So humans are gnats. Doesn’t sound like you hold much confidence in the human race.”

“It’s how the Formics
perceive
us. We think of them as an enemy. An equal. But maybe they see us as something far, far inferior, something barely worth their notice.”

“Maybe,” said Li.

“And if that’s true,” said Bingwen, “it makes me wonder what their true purpose is. A rice farmer doesn’t come down to his paddies to swat at gnats. He comes to tend rice.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is I don’t think the Formics came here solely to kill us.”

“They’ve killed twenty million people, Bingwen.”

“Oh they’re killing us. There’s no question of that. And they’re doing it effectively and intentionally. But that’s not the primary reason
why
they’re here. If it were, we would be their only target. They would always come after us. But initially they didn’t. They killed all living things. Grass, trees, crops. All life. We need to ask ourselves why.”

“I’ll ask you: Why?”

Bingwen shrugged. “Some people might say that they’re here to destroy the planet, that this is what they do as a species. They move through the universe killing all life. Maybe they’re afraid intelligent beings will evolve enough to be a threat to them. So they kill everything to protect themselves against possible future attacks.”

“Kill your enemy before he becomes your enemy.”

“Yes.”

“Is that what
you
think?”

“It’s possible. Maybe even likely. But I don’t think it’s the only explanation. I think it far more likely that Formics are farmers.”

Li raised an eyebrow. “Farmers?”

“Or whatever comes
before
farmers. Once, in my village, we had a few hectares of forest where we wanted to plant other crops besides rice. So we burned down the forest and cleared the land. It took awhile for the soil to heal, but once it did, it was rich and ready for planting. I think the Formics are doing the same, stripping the land to prepare it for crops. You can’t just throw seed on the ground among what’s already growing there and hope for the best. You have to remove everything that’s currently seizing nutrients and start completely over.”

“It’s called ‘terraforming,’” said Li.

“What’s that?”

“What you’re describing. It means they’re preparing the ground for plant life that fits their own protein structure. We’ve known this is what they’re doing for some time now.”

“Why don’t I hear people talking about this?”

“You’re eight years old. Adults don’t have these conversations with children. And anyway most people are idiots. They don’t care about the why. They only care about what threatens them.”

“I care about the why,” said Bingwen.

“Which is why you’re on this train. The military needs people who ask why.”

They finished their meal, and the train pulled away an hour later, loaded with food and supplies. Other soldiers joined them in the passenger car, all of them heavily armed.

Later, in middle of the night, the train suddenly stopped, throwing the passenger car into chaos. Equipment fell from storage compartments. Men tumbled from seats. Bingwen jerked awake.

Li checked his wrist pad. “Something’s wrong.”

He got up and moved toward the front of the train. Bingwen fell in behind him. When they reached the driver’s cab, they found the engineer shaken.

“What’s wrong?” asked Li. “Why have we stopped?”

“Bandits,” said the engineer, pointing out the front window. “They’ve set up a barricade. I had to stop or we would have crashed.”

Bingwen went to the front window. The headlights of the train shined out into the darkness, illuminating thirty men ahead of them on the right side of the track. Most of them were armed with rifles, machetes, or farm tools. A large man sat on a horse at the front of the mob, a rifle resting in the crook of his arm. Thirty meters farther down the track, a huge bonfire made of felled trees burned in the center of the track, surrounded by heavy iron beams, old farming equipment, and large metal drums, all obstructing the way.

Li grabbed the radio from the front console and switched it to external speaker. When he spoke, his voice boomed outside the train. “These tracks are the property of the People’s Republic of China. To obstruct them is treason.”

The man on horseback must have had a projection device because his response was just as loud. “You are no longer in China. We have claimed our independence. The village of Chuanzhen and its lands are ours now. Your government forced us to grow cash crops instead of the crops we need to live on. Now we have no food. And since trade in this region has collapsed, how are we to survive? How can we feed our children? No one will accept our money because the whole financial system has shut down here. We have no choice but to charge you a tax for crossing our lands. We know you have food and supplies on board. Share what you have with us and we’ll clear the track and let you go.”

“I am not the commanding officer on this train,” said Lieutenant Li. “I cannot speak on his behalf. Let me consult with him and return with his answer.”

“You have three minutes,” said the man on the horse.

Li switched off the radio, unholstered his pistol, and gave it to the engineer. “Stay by this door,” he said, gesturing to the side entrance. “If anyone tries to come inside, shoot them.”

The engineer took the gun, holding it daintily. He was not military.

Li left the cab and moved back deeper into the train. Bingwen followed. In the third car they found fifty soldiers loading their weapons, checking their gear, putting on body armor.

“There are about thirty of them,” Li told the soldiers. “All of them are traitors. Some are armed with machetes and old hunting rifles. I doubt many of them can shoot straight, but take out the rifles first just in case. There may be more in the trees on either side of the train. Look for heat signatures. I suggest getting off near the back and then coming up on either side using the trees for cover. Once it starts, they’ll break and scatter. Be quick and clean.”