Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

of time. She had gone to school to be a doctor, to help people, to save lives, not to sit around a conference room and look at spreadsheets and due dates and discuss the minutiae of every project. That was an administrator’s job. That’s what managers did. Doctors got their hands dirty. Doctors rushed to bedsides, giving comfort, cheating death. Meetings like this were death, slow and painful and mind-numbingly boring.
    “Kim? Are you with us?”
    She looked up. Everyone around the table was staring at her. She had been doodling on her holopad, making swirls all over the spreadsheet. She blinked and sat upright. “Yes. Sorry. Go on.”
    The group went back to it, chattering away about some production issue: the manufacturers in China who were assembling the most recent round of Med-Assists weren’t going to meet their deadline; the workers weren’t coming into the plant.
    “Can you blame them?” said Kim. “There is a war on. Alien civilization. People dying. I wouldn’t want to go into work either.”
    “Business must go on, Kim,” said one of the project managers. “There’s no telling how big this could get. The military might deploy troops. If New Zealand gets in this fight, we need to be ready with the Med-Assist.”
    He was right, Kim knew. She had seen all the statistical reports; the Med-Assist reduced combat casualties by as much as sixty percent in some studies. Yet even so, it struck Kim as absurd that they would sit here and discuss something as frivolous as labor disputes while thousands of civilians died in rural China. There were aliens out there, for crying out loud. Malicious, highly advanced aliens. The world had changed overnight. They were fretting over a burning tree while the forest blazed all around them.
    But she said none of this aloud. Instead she smiled politely and pretended to listen as the meeting continued and the discussion moved on to other production issues.
    This had never been in the job description, she told herself. They had said nothing about her helping to manage logistical concerns or labor disputes. And yet here she was, enduring another mindless meeting on those very subjects.
    She had tried to get out of them, she had pled to upper management that they excuse her from all management duties, yet her request had been denied. She knew every function of the Med-Assist. An issue in another department might affect what she was doing. She needed to stay in the loop, she needed to be aware.
    For the hundredth time she questioned if coming to New Zealand had been the right decision. They had promised her that she would be helping more people through the device, and technically that was true. But now those words felt like a misleading promise. She was helping more people, yes, but she never got to see any of them; she never got to give their hands a reassuring squeeze before surgery, or watch their faces light up when she told them all would be well. They were numbers, not names. All the humanity and thrill and reward of being a doctor were missing. It was the work of saving lives, but the work felt lifeless.
    Mazer had made it tolerable. When they were together she had ignored the doubts about the job. All the mindless meetings and administrative crap was bearable if it meant having him at her side.
    But now even that was gone.
    Mazer. She couldn’t think of him without four different emotions assaulting her at once. She was angry still, of course. Furious even. How could he think that what they had could be snipped in two and so easily ended? Had it meant so little to him? Then there was the sorrow and the empty loneliness of it all, the vacant feeling she couldn’t seem to shake.
    But most of all was the worry. The fear that he was dead somewhere in China. He was right at the center of it. Of all the places in the world to go, the Formics had landed there. And not just one lander, but all three.
    She had seen him pull the boy from the mud. The press was still playing it over and over again. When she heard that the Formics had landed in China, it was as if her heart had dropped out of her chest. She had glued herself to the feeds, hoping to see something that would reassure her that he was all right.
    And then there he was. Right on the screen. Right in front of her. Right there in the mud and thick of it, right at the epicenter. And she had burst into tears.
    That had been twelve hours ago, and since then no word. She wasn’t sure what she expected. A call from