Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) by Orson Scott Card, Aaron Johnston Page A

take us all, but a death nonetheless. If we did not feel so, I suppose we would be unfit for command.” He turned and faced them. “I have lost upwards of ten thousand since this war began. All of them sons and daughters to me. If we do not stop this gas, this weapon of the enemy, I will lose them all. See to it that I don’t.”

 
    CHAPTER 6
    Reinforcements
    When Victor awoke in the cargo bay he was weightless again, his arms floating out beside him in the air, his feet anchored firmly to the wall.
    “Victor, can you hear me?”
    A voice in his ear, over the radio. He blinked again, his mind still in a fog. “Imala?”
    “You blacked out. Are you hurt?”
    She was out in the shuttle. He remembered now. He had fallen from the cart, and his boot magnets had saved him. He had initiated them as he was falling, and he had kicked out frantically toward the wall until one of the boot soles had snapped against the surface and held. Gravity had swung the rest of his body downward like a pendulum, and he had slammed into the side of the wall with such force that he was certain he had broken something.
    “Answer me, Vico. Are you hurt?”
    “My ankle,” he said. “I think I sprained it.” The pain was throbbing and hot.
    “Yes, it’s starting to swell,” said Imala. “I have your biometrics here in front of me. I’ll inflate and cool the area.”
    Victor winced as the suit around his ankle filled with air and dropped in temperature.
    “You’re in the open, Vico. You need to move. There’s a shaft near you. Can you reach it?”
    Victor reoriented himself and took in his surroundings. The shaft was fifteen meters to his right. “Yes. I can make it.”
    “Then move,” said Imala. “You’re near the debris, and one of the Formics may have survived the fall.”
    Victor turned and looked in the direction he had fallen, shocked to see how close he had come to death. The wreckage from the human ships had scrunched together into a giant mangled heap, only ten meters from his current position. Had he fallen any farther, he would have impaled himself on a jagged piece of metal protruding from the pile.
    Imala was wrong, though. If there were Formics in that heap, none of them could have survived.
    Even so, he needed to get out of the open. He bent forward, attached his glove magnets to the wall, and began to climb, wincing in pain whenever he pushed off with his left foot. He reached the shaft, climbed inside, and concealed himself in the shadows.
    From here he had a good view of the cargo bay. The inner wall of the bay had taken a beating from the gravity. Whole sections of wall had crumpled inward and broken free, exposing rows of tightly packed pipes underneath. The pipes all seemed to be running in the same direction from the front of the ship toward the rear. There were valves and fasteners on the pipes every few meters, and to Victor’s surprise none of the pipes appeared damaged.
    Elsewhere, where the inner wall had held, cart-pulling Formics had gone back to work, pulling their cargo on the tracks as if nothing had happened. A few had stopped at places where the inner wall in front of them had been ripped away, leaving them no more track to walk on. They stood there, stuck, unable to advance.
    “What happened, Imala?” Victor asked. “Why did we suddenly have gravity in here?”
    “The ships that attacked must have fired a weapon that somehow created gravity inside the ship.”
    “How is that possible?”
    “No idea,” said Imala. “But all of the cannons on the surface of the Formic ship were crushed against the hull like tinfoil. That’s why you blacked out. You were feeling too many Gs. It’s a miracle your boot magnets held.”
    “What happened to the attacking ships?”
    “Destroyed as well. Once the cannons were gone, the irises on the hull of the Formic ship opened and unleashed the plasma. The attacking ships were vaporized in an instant. I recorded the whole thing. That’s why you’re