Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

seemingly intelligent, noncrazy one to boot. He felt like leaping across the seat and embracing her.
    “I’m not the only one either,” said Yanyu. “In the forums, a lot of researchers are talking about it, though most of them post anonymously so as not to damage their reputation in case the whole thing proves false.”
    “It’s not false,” said Victor.
    “You don’t have to convince me,” said Yanyu, smiling.
    “Yanyu has been studying the interference,” said Imala.
    “The media keeps broadcasting all kinds of theories,” said Yanyu. “The prevailing one at the moment is that the interference is caused by CMEs.”
    Victor nodded, unsurprised. If he had to invent a theory, he’d probably go there as well. Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, were huge magnetized clouds of electrified gas, or plasma, that burst out of the sun’s atmosphere and shot across the solar system at millions of miles per hour, oftentimes expanding to ten millions times their original size. They had been known to disrupt power and communication in space before, though never on this scale.
    “It’s not CMEs,” said Victor.
    “No,” said Yanyu. “But the idea is right. The gamma radiation this alien ship is emitting moves much like a CME, constantly expanding as it spreads across the solar system. If I had to guess, I’d say the ship has a ramscoop drive, sucking up hydrogen atoms at near-lightspeed and using the subsequent gamma radiation as a propellant, shooting it out the back to rocket the ship forward. It’s brilliant engineering since the ship would have an infinite supply of fuel.”
    “If that’s true,” said Imala, “then why is the radiation coming in our direction, toward Earth? If it’s propulsion, shouldn’t it be emitting away from us, toward deep space?”
    Yanyu smiled again. “That’s just it. It’s not accelerating. It’s decelerating. It’s desperately trying to slow down.”
    “It wouldn’t emit the radiation from the front,” said Victor. “Even to slow down. That would be suicide. It would fly right into its own destructive cloud of plasma.”
    “True,” said Yanyu. “But the ship might emit the radiation from the sides . It would do so in equal bursts so as not to deviate it from its course, and that would explain why the interference happened so fast and spread so quickly in all directions before anyone knew what was happening.”
    Victor considered this. It made sense. He had known superficially that the hormiga ship was causing the radiation, yet until now he hadn’t known how.
    “So this ship,” said Imala, “is acting like a volatile minisun rocketing toward us.”
    “Basically,” said Yanyu.
    “That’s comforting,” said Imala.
    “How did you figure this out?” asked Victor.
    Yanyu pulled a holopad from her bag. “It’s the only explanation I could think of for this.” She tapped a command and extended two thin poles from opposite corners on the holopad’s surface. A moment later, a holo consisting of hundreds of tiny, random dots of light flickered to life above the pad. At first Victor thought he was looking at a star cluster, but as he leaned forward and got a closer look, a sickening feeling tugged at the pit of his stomach. He had seen such a cluster before. Deep in the Kuiper Belt.
    “What is it?” asked Imala.
    “Wreckage,” said Victor.
    Yanyu nodded, grave. “I’m still running scans because the readings from the scopes aren’t particularly clear, but I think Victor’s right. These objects appear to be moving away from each other at a constant speed from a center point. Like ship debris from an explosion.”
    “How many ships?” said Victor.
    Yanyu shrugged. “No way to be certain, but probably dozens. If you trace the movement of all of the debris, the point of origin is here in the Asteroid Belt, near an asteroid named Kleopatra. Juke has facilities on the asteroid’s surface, so there’s always a lot of traffic there. If a burst of radiation from the alien ship took out the mining ships in that vicinity, then we have to assume that it took out all the facilities on Kleopatra as well.”
    “How many people are stationed there?” asked Imala.
    “Between seven and eight thousand,” said Yanyu.
    Imala swore under her breath.
    “And who knows how many people were on those ships,” said Yanyu. “Maybe double that. We have no way of knowing.”
    “How old is this data?” said Victor.
    “I got the first scans back this morning,”