Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

attention. A shirt he recognized. A shirt he had seen up close when the person wearing it had put him in a headlock once.
    Zihao.
    Alive, Zihao had always worn a bullish, condescending sneer. But here, lying on his back in the mud, he looked afraid: wide eyes, rigid body, a dirty face streaked with tears. He seemed younger, too. Like a child. Bingwen looked away.
    A faint hiss from behind caused Bingwen to turn around suddenly. Back at the end of the access road, a few hundred meters behind him, four aliens were spraying the healthy grass and moving in his direction. They seemed unaware of Bingwen, but he knew that wouldn’t last.
    Bingwen yanked on the lead rope and got the water buffalo moving. He didn’t stop to look at faces. He didn’t step carefully. He ran.
    The water buffalo sensed his urgency and ran as well, big lumbering strides that weren’t fast enough for Bingwen, who kept yanking and pulling on the rope. The animal stumbled once, but quickly regained its footing. They ran for fifteen minutes, never slowing until the valley turned south and the aliens were long out of view. They stopped, both of them wheezing and breathing heavily, the water buffalo moaning and mooing. Bingwen’s broken arm felt as if it were on fire; all the jostling and running had aggravated the break. A stitch in his side burned so hot Bingwen was convinced he had torn something inside.
    The water buffalo wavered, and for a moment Bingwen thought it might keel over. Then it shook its head and gathered itself.
    Bingwen looked to his left and saw that they had arrived. There was wreckage a hundred meters away. Mazer’s aircraft. Bingwen was sure of it. A fire had consumed it and burned it black, but the flames had long since died out, and the familiar shape of the aircraft was still intact. The only new feature was the four rotor blades on the top of the aircraft, which must have snapped open as the aircraft fell.
    Bingwen’s heart sank at the sight. There couldn’t possibly be any survivors. The aircraft had exploded, sending shrapnel and debris in every direction. Even if someone had survived the impact, they couldn’t have gotten clear of the explosion in time. Nor could they have ejected before impact, not with the rotor blades, not in a dead drop.
    Bingwen felt ashamed. He should have listened to Grandfather. He was foolish to have come out here.
    Something near the wreckage caught his eye. A rifle perhaps? That would be useful. And where there was one, there might be others; and if not other weapons, then perhaps other tools. He pulled on the rope. The water buffalo didn’t want to move; it still wheezed and whined from their run. Bingwen pulled anyway with his good arm, and eventually the animal walked.
    The wreck smelled like ashes and burning things and what might be the scent of charred human remains. Smoke still hung thick in the air and stung Bingwen’s eyes. He didn’t want to look inside the cabin or cockpit. He knew what he would find there.
    The ground was littered with shrapnel and debris, some pieces as big as Bingwen, all folded up and bent in odd shapes with torn edges that looked dangerously sharp.
    Bingwen’s eyes were locked on the rifle ahead of him, but as he approached it, moving through the smoke, something else near the weapon caught his eye. A body.
    Bingwen ran forward, frantic, the lead rope dropping from his hand.
    It was Mazer. There was blood and mud all over him. His arms, his head, his side. His side was the worst. A bloody bandage lay draped across his abdomen, soaked through and deep red. The contents of a med kit lay scattered around him. Someone had administered first aid. Someone was alive and helping. Bingwen looked around.
    “Hello?”
    No one answered.
    To his left was another body. The female soldier. Bingwen instantly knew she was dead, even without seeing her face, which was turned away from him. She had too many wounds. Her skin was white and lifeless. Her clothes were burned. Her arm was twisted behind her.
    In the fields, the corpses had looked asleep, peaceful even in some instances. Not so here. This had been a hard death. Quick most likely, instantaneous even, but it terrified Bingwen more than anything he had seen thus far.
    There were lines in the dirt from the aircraft to the woman’s body where her boots had dragged across the soil. Mazer had pulled her from the fire, Bingwen realized. Wounded as he was, Mazer had pulled her from the flames. Bingwen could think of