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One of the Formics rose up and fired. A glob of thick mucus shot forth and splattered against the windshield in front of the copilot's seat, creating a circle of goo half a meter in diameter. Inside the goo was a paper-thin, symmetrical weblike membrane--like a delicately crocheted doily.
The membrane flashed with white light, and the windshield exploded, showering Mazer with tiny shards of glass. Pain hit Mazer, hot and searing, and his HUD started flashing a warning. There were holes in his suit.
The Formics rushed forward, surging for the cockpit.
Mazer had his pistol up in his hands an instant later, firing.
The head of the lead Formic snapped back and its body went limp, still clinging to the hull. The other Formics were undeterred. They scurried forward with unnatural speed. Mazer shot one in the throat and the second in the arm. The latter kept coming, its arm half severed. Mazer put three more rounds in its chest as it tried to crawl into the cockpit, finally killing it.
But that was only the first wave.
Four more were coming, all of them scurrying down the transport with an even greater sense of urgency. One of them fired. The doily glob struck the front of the HERC beneath the windshield. Mazer didn't see where it landed exactly, but the explosion followed an instant later, and then everything went wrong.
Alarms. Smoke. Vibrations. Spots of light twinkling in his vision. A garble of sounds swir
led in his head; one moment they were a thousand miles away; a half second later they were deafening. He couldn't see, couldn't think, couldn't make sense of any of it. It was as if the world had been thrown inside a rattle and shaken vigorously.
His vision cleared. He blinked, shook his head. His ears were ringing.
Where was he?
The HERC.
Something was wrong with the HERC. Why was he upside down?
The pistol. He needed the pistol. He looked at his hands and found them empty.
Something hit him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. It fell to the ceiling in front of him. A Formic. Heavy and hairy, its limbs tangled and scrabbling for purchase, furious, desperate, flopping around in the tight space as it tried to right itself. Mazer couldn't breath. His chest was empty, his diaphragm flat. All the blood had rushed to his head. He sucked in air, filling his lungs.
The Formic got its footing and came at him, its maw biting at the hard plastic of his visor. Two of its hands--still in their disc-shaped gloves--pounded him, hitting him like fist-sized balls of lead. His shoulders, helmet, chest, arms. Mazer grabbed the creature's forelimbs to try to wrestle it away, but the Formic, despite its size, was as strong as he was.
He almost didn't notice the weapon in its secondary hands, compact and gleaming, aimed at his center mass. Mazer only had time to swat it to the side. The barrel swung wide, and when it discharged, the glob fired out the windshield, hit the transport near its nose, and exploded outward.
Mazer was thrown against his seat. The Formic slammed into him again. Everything started to spin. Outside the windshield the world flashed past like an amusement ride. Earth, sky, earth, sky. He had no sense of direction, no idea what was up and down anymore. He heard a voice. Calm and clear. A woman's, speaking in Chinese. Pleasant but insistent. What was it? Who was she?
It was the HERC's AI, he realized, calmly reading off a litany of system failures.
Mazer pushed the Formic's limp body off him. A shard of shrapnel protruded from its back.
He steadied himself against the wall. His equilibrium was shot. He was going to be sick.
"Get ready," shouted Wit.
For a moment the words meant nothing to him. Get ready? Then it came him. Wit. The hole. The grenades. His asinine, half-baked plan. They were still connected to the transport, both ships spinning and plummeting together.
"Hole is cut," shouted Wit. "I'm punching through."
There was a clang and then Mazer heard three deep pops in quick succession. Thoop thoop thoop.
"Cut us loose!" Wit shouted. "Fire in the hole!"
A Formic crawled over the lip of the windshield, its hind legs clinging to the HERC with its magnet discs. It looked at Mazer and raised its jar weapon. Light swirled inside it as it prepared to fire.
Mazer blinked the command, and three things happened in quick succession: the talons disengaged, the HERC shot free as if slung from a catapult, and everyone on board was thrown violently to the side.
If they had been spinning before, they were in a vortex now. The Formic was no longer at the windshield. The world outside was a blur. They were falling. Twisting. Rolling. The dash was beeping. The numbers in his HUD from the instruments were spinning or changing or gone completely. The female AI was slowly, methodically, ticking off the reasons why they were about to die.
He had to adjust the grav lens. He had to reorient them, stop them, steady them, save them.
