Bingwen fell silent. Soon, his breathing had slowed and he was asleep. Mazer leaned back against the tree, listening to the wind blow in from the south and rustle the wilted leaves overhead. The wind carried with it faint traces of a putrid smell—a smell Mazer hadn’t noticed in a while. He sniffed the air and grimaced. It was the scent of bodies rotting in the sun.
He pulled his old shirt from his pack, ripped up the fabric, and tied a makeshift bandana over his mouth and nose. Then he took the sidearm from his hip and silently removed the clip. He took out the rounds and counted them. Then he reloaded the gun and did the math in his head, adding up the number of rounds from the other clips. About eighty rounds total. Not much at all.
So why was he going to the lander? Why was he being so insanely stubborn? Why did he think he could face an army of Formics?
Because of Kim, he told himself. Because he had left her so that she might have a life she deserved, and he wasn’t going to let the Formics ruin that. Because of Patu and Reinhardt and Fatani and Bingwen’s parents and Ye Ye Danwen. Because this was Bingwen’s China, not theirs.
He settled back against the tree and recited the words of the haka his mother had taught him so long ago. A song of the Maori warrior. The dance of death.
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
Tenei te tangata puhuru huru
Nana nei i tiki mai, whakawhiti te ra
A upane! ka upane!
A upane! ka upane!
Whiti te ra! Hi!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
This is the hairy man
Who has caused the sun to shine again
The Sun shines!
Then Mazer turned his face into an ugly grimace and stuck out his tongue. Let them see the face that will strike them down. Let them see anger. Let them feel fear.
CHAPTER 25
Space Junk
The rings of junk around Earth were like the rings of Saturn, only instead of ice and silicates, Victor saw thousands of discarded satellites and long-forgotten space stations and old, outmoded weapons from the time when countries were all arming in Earth orbit.
“Look at all of this, Imala,” said Victor. “It’s just floating out here waiting for someone to scoop it up and use it. Do you have any idea what my family could have done with all this?”
Imala piloted the shuttle toward a spot in the junk heap where several different satellites were relatively close together. “This is as near as you’ve ever been to Earth, Victor. You’ve got a breathtaking view of the planet directly in front of you, and all you see are the completely worthless, broken shiny objects.”
Victor was floating at the artificial windshield, taking in the scene in front of him, a sea of metal and plastic and polycarbonates, all glinting in the sunlight. “I see the planet, Imala. It’s beautiful. But you have to realize, out in the K Belt, when something broke, we couldn’t simply go out and get a replacement part. We had to make one. Or pull the necessary pieces from scrap, which were rare and hard to come by. You have everything you could possibly need out here. And a lot of it is new.”
“It’s not new, Vico. It’s crap. It’s old junk.”
“If you think this is old, Imala, you should see the scrap we normally worked with.”
Imala fired up the retros and started the shuttle’s deceleration. Victor was already in his spacewalk suit, a long lifeline extending from the back of it. He wore a propulsion pack and carried a laser cutter, which he would use to snip off pieces of the junk to haul back to the shuttle.
“Some of these pieces were weapons once,” said Imala. “So don’t go cutting willy-nilly. Use the schematics I uploaded to your HUD. You’ll be able to see where it’s safe to cut and where it isn’t.” She had used her LTD access back on Luna to dig through the agency’s archives and pull files on as many of the objects out here as there was still a record for.
“Thanks,” said Victor. “I’ll try not to blow us up.”
“That’s not even remotely funny,” said Imala.
“Don’t worry. This isn’t explosive material. I know what I’m doing.”
Imala moved the shuttle alongside the first of the satellites and Victor excused himself to the airlock. Once outside he got right to work. The reconnaissance shuttle needed to look like a hunk of debris, so Victor was most interested in the worthless guts of the satellites. The conduit and structural braces and insulation, all the stuff that would be exposed to space if a ship were ripped in half. All the really valuable pieces—the processors and chips and fuel cells and lenses—were typically small and therefore unimportant. Even so, Victor couldn’t pass up the temptation to cut away a few processor chips and sneak them into his chest pouch.