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He tried readjusting his grip so he could free his other hand to reach back and unstrap the bag.
But then the anchor rod bent again with a screech of twisting metal and the cart tipped downward. The duffel bag slipped free and slammed into him, knocking Victor free. Arms flailing, he reached out, grabbed nothing but air, and fell.
CHAPTER 5
Alliance
Just outside the city of Lianzhou, at the foothills of the Nanling Mountains in southeast China, Mazer Rackham sat cross-legged on the dirt floor of his tent, eyes closed, back straight, deep in meditation. He was aware of everything around him. The cot to his right. The wind on his face and bare chest--blowing in gently from the open tent flap. The warmth of the sun. The dirt and grass and pebbles beneath him. The soldiers and vehicles moving about the camp. The four armed Chinese guards outside the tent, each ready to shoot him should he try to escape.
Mazer inhaled deep, exhaled slowly. His Maori mother had taught him to believe in Te Kore, the void, the place unseen, the realm beyond the world of everyday experience, an existence between nonbeing and being. The realm of potential being.
Mazer knew he was well below his potential at the moment. His body was not as strong as it had been--his abdominal wound had sapped him of energy and strength. Nor was his mind as clear as it should be. The deaths of his crew and companions still swirled in his mind like a storm. Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt--killed when the Formics shot down their HERC. Then Danwen, the grandfather who had tended Mazer's wounds. And now Calinga was gone as well, vaporized in the nuke detonation.
The loss of them all left an emptiness inside him, as if a plug had been pulled from his foot and a portion of his soul had drained out of him like water.
No, not soul. Mana. Energy, essence, power, the presences of the natural world. That's what had flowed out of him. That's what the whakapapa taught, what Mother had whispered in his ears at night as a child as she tucked him into bed. "We are all brothers and sisters, Mazer. People, birds, the fishes, trees. All of this is family. All of this is whanau."
His Father had called it nonsense. He had never said so while Mother was still fighting cancer, but Father had made his feelings plain enough after she had died. He never forbade Mazer from believing, but Father's skepticism and disdain for it was so thick and bitter and obvious that Mazer had abandoned it for no other reason than to remove anything in their lives that might keep him and Father apart.
But now here Mazer was, drained of mana, sapped of his essence.
The rational, educated side of his mind--the side shaped by Father and books and computers--said that such thoughts were ridiculous. The mystical Maori mana was a thing of fiction. A fool's hope, a religion born of ignorance.
Yet there was a stronger voice inside Mazer. A voice that clung to the notion. Mother's voice. Soft and gentle and layered in love. A voice that told him to believe.
He had not entertained such thoughts for many years. Mazer's faith had died when Mother did. And yet he couldn't deny that something had leaked out of him. He could feel the vacancy as assuredly as he felt the ground beneath him. And until mana flowed back into him, he could not be who he was, who he should be. His mind was clear on that point. Unless he found mana, unless it flowed back into him, he would continue as a lesser form of himself.
He opened his eyes and dug at the dirt. He found a pebble just below the surface no bigger than a pill. He lifted his canteen off the cot and poured water over the small stone, rubbing it between his fingers to clean it of dirt. In the school of learning, the whare wananga, a student swallowed a small pebble, a whatu, in the initiation ceremony. It was believed that by swallowing the stone, a student established the conditions whereby mana could flow into that person in the form of knowledge.
Mazer placed the stone on his tongue, took a drink of water, and swallowed.
It was not foolishness, he told himself. He had done this eagerly as a child, swallowing the water so quickly that some of it had gone down the wrong pipe and sent him into a fit of coughing. Mother had watched from the front row of the cultural center, beaming with pride. And hadn't he felt stronger after the ceremony? Hadn't he flexed his arms and told Mother that, yes, he could feel it now. He was stronger. And she had laughed and taken a knee in front of him and told him how proud she was of her little warrior. Mazer had felt such a rush of love in that moment, that the memory of it, even now, caused his cheeks to burn. If that wasn't mana, he didn't know what was.
A jeep came to a stop in front of his tent, tires squishing in the mud. Mazer watched as Captain Shenzu of the People's Liberation Army got down from the driver's seat, approached Mazer's tent, and stepped inside. Shenzu's camouflaged field uniform was a mottled mix of browns and greens with his rank on his collar and the red star of the Chinese military embroidered on his upper right sleeve. He looked as if he hadn't slept in days.
"General Sima requests your presence," Shenzu said in English. "Please put on a shirt and come with me."
Mazer's shirt lay on his cot. He had removed it before his meditation and exercise. Prior to the crash, he could do a hundred push-ups without slowing his pace or breaking much of a sweat, but now he could barely do twenty without the pain in his abdomen lighting up like a flare.
He got to his feet and picked up the shirt.
Shenzu winced and gestured to the red, jagged scar across Mazer's midsection. "That's a nasty cut, Captain. And recent by the look of it."
Mazer pulled the shirt down over his head and covered the scar. "Our HERC was shot down near Dawanzhen by a swarm of Formic fighters. I was the lucky one."
Shenzu's expression softened. "And your crew? Patu, Fatani, and Reinhardt?"
Shenzu knew their names of course. It was Shenzu who had come to New Zealand before the war and convinced Mazer's superiors at the New Zealand Special Air Service to conduct a joint training exercise with the Chinese military. And it was Shenzu who had handpicked Mazer and his crew for the task. The deal was simple. Mazer and his team would teach Chinese pilots how to fly the HERC--a new experimental anti-grav aircraft--and the NZSAS would get a few free aircraft for their trouble.
"My crew died on impact," said Mazer.
Shenzu looked genuinely regretful. "You have my condolences, Captain. They were good soldiers."
"Thank you," said Mazer. "And yes, they were."
A silence stretched between them until Shenzu said, "I suppose I am partly responsible for their deaths. I brought them to China, after all."
"You didn't know what was coming," said Mazer. "The Formics killed them, not you. Though you did threaten to shoot us down."
