Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

front of him, putting a hand behind his head. “I think only of you, little one. I cannot let you go. I could not live with myself if something happened to you.”
    “Survival is why I must go, Grandfather. We need these men. Mother and Father are still out there. And right now these soldiers are the only ones trying to bring us all together.”
    That gave Grandfather pause. He pursed his lips, considered, then painfully got to his feet. “I will go then.” He held out his hand for the lead rope.
    Bingwen sighed. This was wasting time. Every moment counted. “Grandfather, you might be able to walk down this mountain, but you can’t walk back up it. Not yet anyway. Not until you’ve mended. We both know that.”
    He didn’t wait for Grandfather to respond; he tugged on the lead rope and led the water buffalo onto the access road.
    “And how will you bring back a wounded soldier?” Grandfather asked.
    “Very carefully,” said Bingwen.
    He hurried down the road, eager to get away before Grandfather made some additional argument and forced Bingwen, out of respect, to stop and address it with a rational rebuttal—neither of which Bingwen had time for. The water buffalo didn’t like the speed and kept yanking back on the lead rope and forcing Bingwen to slow down. Twice the animal stopped altogether to stick its nose in the air and smell the smoke that kept wafting across their path. Bingwen gave it a hard slap on the rump and got it moving again.
    At the top of the mountain Bingwen had been fearless. But the farther he went down the road, the more his courage failed him. The trees that covered the road were suddenly hiding places for the aliens. The thick scrub on the shoulder was suddenly the perfect place for an ambush. The thin braches that stuck out from the forest were suddenly wands waiting to spray a mist into his face. There were aircraft sounds as well, loud and fast, some close, others far away, and every time Bingwen heard one, he was convinced the aircraft was falling toward him, like a burning meteor, targeted directly to his position. The water buffalo seemed to feel the same way. The closer they got to the valley floor, the more resistant and agitated it became.
    Soon the trees began to thin, and the whole of the valley plain came into view. It was the back side of the mountain, a valley Bingwen hadn’t been able to see from the farmhouse, and the sight of it stopped him cold.
    There were bodies on the ground. People. Not clumped together in a big group, but spread out all over the valley in ones and twos and threes, as if a big crowd of villagers had all decided to find a spot away from the others to lie down and go to sleep.
    Only, they weren’t sleeping. There was no rise and fall to their chests, no casual repositioning of their bodies as sleeping people do. No movement of any kind except for wisps of hair and corners of clothing blown back and forth in the wind.
    The closest body was thirty meters away under the shade of a tree. A woman, Mother’s age, lying on her side, facing Bingwen, her shirt hanging loosely off her shoulder in a way that no modest woman would ever consciously allow. One of her shoes lay on the ground beside her. Her eyes were open, her mouth slightly ajar, as if she had been waiting for Bingwen to arrive and was just calling out his name when time had stood still and frozen her in that position.
    Around her, the rice shoots were curled and black and dead.
    The mist had caused this, Bingwen realized. The chemical the creatures sprayed from their wands had killed everything it had touched: the crop, the fleeing villagers, even a few animals here and there: dogs and birds and two water buffalo. There were large patches of healthy crop as well—green rice shoots that had been spared the mist, some of them as tall as Bingwen’s shoulders—but these were in the minority. Most of the valley floor was mud and death and withered shoots of rice.
    On the far side of the valley, a downed Chinese aircraft billowed black smoke and ash into the air. Bingwen could hear the crackle and sizzle of the flames and the popping and breaking of components inside. He could smell it, too, an acrid stench of melting plastic and rubber and other synthetics.
    It wasn’t Mazer’s aircraft, he knew. That crash had occurred elsewhere, at least another kilometer away and probably farther. Yet the sight of this one didn’t fill Bingwen with much confidence. The aircraft was barely