Mazer leaned out of the HERC and looked back one last time at the farmhouse, getting smaller behind them in the distance. The boy, Bingwen, had been lucky. Another meter or two to the right or left underneath that tree, and the dirt would have buried him alive. How many like him were stuck in those fields, Mazer wondered, trapped in some pocket of air, waiting for rescue that probably wasn’t coming?
Mazer leaned back inside and flipped on his HUD. Patu was sending him several feeds, each positioned at one of the corners of his field of vision. They were all satellite feeds, taken from above, giving him a clear view of the top of the lander, which had opened. A large dark circle was now in the center, like the hole of a doughnut, exposing a vast space inside mostly hidden in shadow.
“What are we looking at?” said Mazer. “Can we see what’s inside?”
“Negative,” said Patu. “I’ve tried various spectrums. The sun’s too low. Not enough light is getting in.”
They crested the final hill and the lander came into view. There was a cluster of aircraft gathered around it now, the medevacs as well as a few other military birds. All with Chinese markings. A few of them hovered over the hole.
“Patu,” said Mazer. “Are there any feeds coming from the aircraft over the lander?”
“Negative. If they’re filming anything, they’re not broadcasting it.”
Shenzu, the Chinese liaison, appeared in the holofield. “We’ll take it from here, Captain Rackham. China appreciates your assistance. Please keep your distance.”
“There may be other survivors,” said Mazer.
“We will see to them,” said Shenzu. His voice was firm, unquestioning.
He winked out.
“What do we do now?” said Reinhardt.
“We obey,” said Mazer. “We hang back. We let them do their job. Fatani, patch us in to their radio chatter. I want to know what they’re saying to each other. Reinhardt, take us back to where we dropped off the first of the wounded. We can carry them up to where the hospital will be set up.”
A beam of light shot out of the center of the lander from deep inside the hole and hit one of the helicopters above it. The laser punched through as if the helicopter weren’t even there, slicing off the spinning rotor blades in an instant. The helicopter dropped like a stone, smoking and burning, twisting, careening. It bounced off the side of the lander and spiraled to the ground where it crashed in a heap and burst into flames.
The other helicopters near the hole began to retreat. They didn’t move fast enough. Three more lasers shot up, slicing the aircraft in half. They each fell from the sky, burning. One of them was a medevac, a big bird. A crew of ten at least. Doctors and nurses. The aircraft exploded before it hit the ground.
Fatani found the radio frequency. Frantic shouts and screams assaulted Mazer’s ears. The Chinese were in a panic.
The last of the helicopters above the lander fell away. It crashed on the top of the lander near the open hole on a flat surface and stayed there, churning out so much black smoke that the helicopter was no longer visible.
Then they came.
At first there were so many of them that Mazer didn’t realize what he was looking at. They were like a colony of bats shooting up out of a cave. Or a swarm of insects erupting upward from their hive in a single column of twisting movement, packed close together and yet not touching one another. They were aircraft, Mazer realized, shooting up from the hole in the lander. A column of fast-moving metal, sharp and dark and frightening, rising quickly, moving as one.
There were two kinds, Mazer realized. One small, the other large, maybe three times the size of the HERC. There were hundreds of them, rising up like water in a straw. Then at an altitude high above the lander they split up, like the roots of an upside-down tree, shooting off in every direction, creating a canopy across the entire landscape that covered the valley with shadows.
One flew directly above the HERC. Mazer craned his neck to watch it pass. It was silent, he realized. They all were silent. No engine noise. No rotors. No sound whatsoever. Like ghosts.
Gunfire erupted from one of the Chinese aircraft to Mazer’s right—an arc of tracer fire that twisted, readjusted, then found its mark. One of the larger retreating alien aircraft took the fire. Bullets pinged off the hull in a shower of sparks, knocking the aircraft out of its flight path and sending it spinning toward the ground. It hit the surface then bounced up momentarily, spinning end over end, reeling, completely out of control. Then it landed again and slid to a stop, leaving a trench behind it where it had dug into the earth.