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Mazer retrieved a laser cutter from the gearbox and sliced the door free. The driver crawled out and thanked them profusely. His hair and shirt were stained with blood.
"What happened?" said Shenzu.
The driver answered in Chinese. "Troop transports. Three of them. They dropped out of nowhere, gentle as a leaf, no sound at all. Formics poured out and climbed up onto my dozer, right up to the cabin. There were six of them directly in front of me, right there on the other side of the glass. I thought they were going to smash their way inside, but they just stood there staring at me, as if they were waiting for me to invite them in."
"What did the other drivers do?" asked Shenzu.
"They had the same problem. Formics had crawled up to their cabins, too. We all had bugs on us."
"This is before they attacked?" asked Shenzu.
"Before anything," said the driver. "No one had so much as shown a weapon. Then Corporal Jijeng, one of the drivers, got spooked and began screaming, panicked. We told him over the radio to calm down, and maybe they would go away. But he wouldn't listen. He drew his pistol and shot two of them through the glass. Then everything went bad. The Formics rushed back to their transports and opened fire. They killed Jijeng first. Incinerated him. I'm not even sure what they hit him with. One moment his dozer is there, the next moment, there's so much fire, I thought the whole world was burning."
"What about the other dozer?" asked Shenzu.
"They hit it with something else. Not fire. Something thick, like a jelly. It went straight through the cabin."
"And you?" said Shenzu. "It looks like they rammed you."
"One of the transports," said the driver. "It hit me so hard I thought my insides had snapped. I still don't know why. It would have been easier to shoot me with the jelly."
"You were lucky," said Shenzu.
Wit asked Shenzu to translate what the driver had said. When Shenzu finished, Wit said, "Ask him if he can still drive a dozer."
Shenzu translated, and the man nodded. "The Formics aren't stopping me, sir."
Mazer bandaged the man's head, then the driver climbed up into the cabin of the new dozer and fired up the engines. As he pushed the wrecked dozers off the road, Shenzu read a message off his wrist pad. "The convoy has already left Lianzhou. They said we better have the road cleared by the time they reach us."
"No pressure," said Mazer.
The three of them hustled back to the HERC and got airborne. Wit took the copilot's seat, and Shenzu buckled up in a jump seat in the main cabin. They followed just behind the dozer as it continued down the highway, clearing the road of obstructions.
They made slow progress for several kilometers without meeting any resistance. Mazer was beginning to think they might actually complete the mission when Lieutenant Hunyan's head appeared in the HERC's holofield above the dash.
"We have a situation," said Hunyan. "Over sixty troop transports just launched from the Formic mothership. They've spread out over a distance of three hundred kilometers and are descending through the atmosphere now. Beijing is tracking them, and we've calculated their projected trajectories. Several of them are heading toward our position. I'm sending you the data now."
A series of images and maps appeared in the holofield.
Mazer studied them, saw where the reinforcements were entering the atmosphere, and turned to Wit. "We should get up there and gather what intel we can."
"Agreed. Shenzu, tell the dozer driver to stay the course and clear the road at all costs. Mazer, take us up."
Mazer spun the HERC 180 degrees, then shot straight up into the air. Wit grabbed a handhold to steady himself, and Mazer felt his stomach drop. They ascended at a steady rate, scanning as they went, and stopped at seven thousand meters. At first the sensors detected nothing, then the instruments started blipping and dozens of dots of light popped up on radar.
"We see them," Mazer said to Hunyan. "They're coming in hot. I count four transports dropping to the convoy's position." He read off the distances, speeds, and angles of approach.
"Lieutenant," said Wit. "Can you turn the convoy around and return to Lianzhou?"
"Negative," said Hunyan. "We're twenty klicks outside the city. The path is barely wide enough for the vehicles to get through. There's no place to turn around."
"Who is with you?" asked Wit.
"The science team, a few dozen officers, and over three hundred enlisted men."
"What about firepower?" asked Wit.
"We've got antiaircraft missiles and four heavily armed VTOLs giving us air support. We've stopped and are forming a perimeter."
