Earth Awakens (The First Formic War) Read Free Page B

into. And more importantly, it was free of Formics.
    He retracted the snake, cut a hole large enough for his body to pass through, pushed the cut piece into the ship, and shined his light inside.
    The shaft was a meter high and four meters wide. It extended to his right and left as far as he could see, sloping downward in either direction, matching the bulbous curvature of the ship. The walls were discolored and unattractive, covered with rust, blemishes, bumps, and imperfections, like scrap metal left to oxidize in a damp place for a few hundred years. It was almost as if the interior of the ship had been built with crude, unrefined ore, creating an ugly canvas of browns and grays and touches of black that felt dingy and ancient and long ignored.
    The air in the shaft was no cleaner. Dust motes and clumps of small, misshapen brown matter floated everywhere. Victor looked at his wrist pad and read the sensors. “Air is twenty-four percent oxygen. That’s only slightly higher than Earth, Imala. The rest is nitrogen, argon, and a touch of carbon dioxide. I could breathe this if I wanted to.”
    “I wouldn’t,” said Imala. “There could be traces of other elements in the air that we can’t detect but are lethal, even in small doses.”
    “I wasn’t planning on taking my helmet off, Imala. Not with all this dung in the air.”
    “Dung?”
    He delicately poked a clump of brown matter hovering nearby, pushing it away. “I’m guessing that’s not mud.”
    “Gross. What is this place? A sewer line?”
    “Either that or the Formics don’t have a good waste-disposal system. Maybe the whole ship’s this way.” He climbed through the hole and into the shaft, pulling his duffel bag in behind him. Then he grabbed the circle of wall he had cut out and pressed it back into place, using magnets to hold it tight. The hole he had cut for the snake camera was still uncovered, so he capped it with a metal patch from his duffel bag. If someone came along and studied the hole, they would see something was amiss, but the walls were so discolored and random that the magnets and patch were fairly camouflaged.
    He stuffed his tools back into his bag and slung the bag back over his shoulder. The lights from his helmet moved around the shaft, taking in his surroundings. “There are grooves in the floor, Imala, like tracks. Maybe two inches deep, running the length of the shaft. I count three of them. The Formics must have equipment that runs on them.”
    “How do you know which wall is the floor?”
    “Educated guess,” he said. “The Formics can walk upright, but they’re tunnel dwellers. They prefer to crawl and don’t require a lot of headroom. So width is more important than height. You could fit four Formics abreast in here. That would allow for several lanes of traffic and tracks for moving equipment.”
    “So where do you go now?”
    Victor looked to his right and left. Neither way gave any hint as to where it might lead. “There are fewer floaties in the air to the right,” he said. “I take this as a good sign.”
    He rotated his body to the right, placed his feet on opposite walls and pushed off, shooting upward. As the shaft curved, he pushed lightly off the walls to course correct himself, keeping his forward momentum, the wall inches from his face.
    “It’s good you’re not claustrophobic,” said Imala.
    “I was born and raised on a mining ship, Imala. I was a mechanic like my father. He used to send me into HVAC ducts and tight spaces when I was four years old to reach things he couldn’t. I’ve spent half my life crammed into places much narrower than—”
    He grabbed the wall and stopped himself; then he blinked out a command and killed his helmet lights.
    “What’s wrong?” asked Imala.
    Victor lowered his voice. “Ahead. I saw light.”
    It had appeared for only an instant, a faint green dot of light that had zipped from one side of the tunnel to the other before disappearing. Victor hovered