And creatures. The garden was crawling with insects and alien animal life. Large beetles scurried along the lichen pillars, feasting on the mosses. These were followed by crablike creatures that bit at the lichen wherever the moss had been pulled away. On the ground, two-legged animals that looked like the offspring of an ostrich and an iguana clung to roots and extended their necks, nipping at whatever fruit was nearest.
As a boy Victor had dreamed of such places. Many times on his family's mining ship in the Kuiper Belt, he had brought up images of the jungles of Earth and imagined himself standing beneath their thick canopies, breathing in the crisp, pure oxygen, inhaling deep their damp, green smells. Father had been a boy in Venezuela, and as a child Victor would ask him again and again to describe a rainstorm in the Amazon or the sounds and smells of a world thick with life.
"What is this, Vico?" Imala asked. "Their food supply?"
"It's their life support, Imala. It's how they generate oxygen."
There were holes in the garden floor in random places, each covered with mesh netting to allow oxygen to circulate throughout the ship without releasing the animals from the habitat.
Victor watched a pair of lichen eaters chip away at one of the pillars. He was zooming in with his visor to get a better look when a Formic scurried around the pillar, seized one of the lichen eaters, and snapped its neck. Then the Formic stuffed the creature into a pouch strapped to its back and was off again, disappearing beneath the canopy.
"Scavenger Formics," said Victor. "They must feed off the lichen eaters." With his visor still zoomed in he tried tracking the Formic. Instead the binocs found a cluster of Formic corpses gathered at the base of a tree, their bodies mostly decomposed and crawling with insects. "They use their dead to fertilize the plants," said Victor. "Nothing wasted."
To Victor's right and left, outside the garden, a corridor curved around the spherical habitat. "I'm going around it, Imala, see if the helm's on the opposite side." He pushed off and moved to his right, launching from wall to wall to move up the corridor. Once he reached the other side he quickly concealed himself. A handful of scavenger Formics were outside the garden sphere, removing dead lichen eaters from their pouches and pushing them down tubes into giant steaming vats. Pipes extended from the vats that led to a feeding station where a row of spigots were positioned. Dozens of Formics were gathered at the spigots. They each came forward in turn, drank their fill from the spigot, then moved on.
"This is how they feed?" asked Imala. "A liquefied slurry of melted crab creatures from a community spigot? How is this an advanced species?"
"I need to find another way around, Imala. I can't go through here."
He backtracked in the corrid
or until he found a groove in the floor. He followed it into a narrow shaft that bypassed the feeding station. That shaft connected with a much larger one, not unlike the giant shaft he had seen empty into the cargo bay.
The shaft ended shortly thereafter at a room as wide as the ship and shaped like a giant wheel. The center or hub of the wheel had consoles and equipment all around it, presumably for operating the spokes of the wheel, which were massive transparent tubes sixty or seventy meters high that extended all the way up to the hull of the ship on all sides. Each tube was over ten meters wide and had a troop carrier at its bottom, nose pointed upward, ready to launch. Hundreds of Formics were climbing up into the bottom of the tubes and loading into the small ships, with wand sprayers in hand and gas packs on their backs.
"What's happening?" asked Imala.
"They're sending down reinforcements," said Victor. "They're launching more ships and troops. They're retaliating for the gravity attack."
The last of the soldier Formics climbed up into the tubes and sealed the door behind them. The Formics manning the consoles outside the tubes spun giant wheels, and the irises at the end of the tubes opened, exposing the blackness of space beyond.
Without warning or countdown, the launch mechanism shot the troop carriers upward like the contents of a giant pneumatic tube, slinging them out into space with such speed that Victor guessed the Formics inside were feeling five or six Gs. The decking beneath Victor shook from the force, and then all was still again. The Formics at the consoles closed the launch tubes, reset the launch mechanisms, and then exited the room, leaving it unoccupied. Victor waited a few minutes to ensure no one returned and then launched down to the equipment, Imala cursing him the whole way for taking yet another risk.
"A needed risk, Imala. "This is how they replenish their forces. If we can find a way to sabotage the tubes, then we can cut off their line of troops and supplies, we can weaken them by attrition."
He caught himself on the consoles, eager to see the tech. But just like the Formic pod he and Father had boarded in the Kuiper Belt, the console here had no markings whatsoever. "Look at this, Imala. Nothing is labeled. There's no language, no numbers, no symbols of any kind. No instructions whatsoever on how to operate this thing."
"Maybe they don't need symbols. Maybe they know the equipment perfectly."
"Everything has symbols, Imala. Humans would be lost without labels on our buttons. We'd be operating blind. How do they measure anything without numbers? Speed, intake, fuel, weight, navigation. How can they be precise about what they're doing? This is like a keyboard without letters. And look at the setup. It's entirely mechanical. No screens, no readouts. There have to be computer elements to this, but I can't see them."
He flew to one of the tubes and examined the launch mechanism. It took him over an hour to determine how it operated. Imala kept pestering him about time and his oxygen levels and the need to get moving. Finally he heeded her and moved on, taking another passageway behind the hub and launch tubes. He maneuvered through the tunnels for another half hour--doubling back at a few places and taking different routes--before he finally found the helm, positioned as he had expected in the center of the ship. Victor hid himself inside the door and recorded everything with his helmetcam.
The helm was a compact space only big enough to accommodate eight Formic workers, all of them buckled to poles that extended from the floor or ceiling. They hovered before a series of screens showing the blackness of space from various angles. Tiny objects on the screen were drifting, and the computer tracked each one with a dot of light.
"This must be their collision-avoidance system, Imala. This is how they track any approaching ship."
"If they're tracking movement here," said Imala, "they probably open the irises and fire the weapon from here as well."
Victor watched the Formics work, recording their every move. He had hoped to find a leader here, someone giving orders to the crew or, even better, commanding the troops on Earth. A general, a king, a ruler, anything. Victor no longer had the explosive device, but he still had his sidearm. If he killed the leader, the others in the helm would overwhelm him, but wasn't that a sacrifice he should be willing to make? Wasn't that his duty as a human being, to strike a heavy blow even if it cost him his life?
A part of him had worried that once he reached the helm his courage would fail him, that he would freeze again like he had done the first time he saw a Formic. But now that he was here, now that his hand was on his sidearm and the opportunity was before him, the doubt was replaced with a surprisingly steady calm. He was ready to die, he realized. They had killed Alejandra and Concepcion and Toron and Father. They had destroyed his ship, his only home, everything he had ever owned and cared about. Maybe Mother as well.
Yes, he could kill. And gladly.
But as he watched those on the helm, it quickly became apparent that no one was in charge. No one relayed any orders, no one shared any intel, no one sought instructions from a superior. Nor were there any written messages being shared, or gestures, or communication of any kind.
It all became clear to Victor then.