Earth Afire (The First Formic War)

Kim. “The kid’s the only one who speaks English. None of them has any medical training.” She had read the boy’s responses to all the questions the device had asked. “Can we do a shadow surgery?”
    He looked unsure. “Maybe. I don’t know their skill level.”
    “They have no skill level. But they’re already halfway through it. We have to try.” Kim took the line off mute. “Bingwen, can you hear me?”
    “Yes. I’m here. I thought I had lost you.” He sounded afraid.
    “No, Bingwen. I’m here. I have another doctor with me. We’re going to try something. It’s called a shadow surgery. Dr. Mendelsohn and I are going to show you exactly what to do. We’ll have a holo of your friend here in front of us. We’ll perform the rest of the surgery step by step and the person on your end just has to mimic everything we do. You’re very close. You’ve been doing wonderfully.”
    “The woman here who’s doing it wants to give up. She doesn’t think she can finish. She’s been going for hours.”
    “She can do it, Bingwen,” said Kim. “You have to convince her to keep going.”
    “I’m trying. She’s not listening.”
    Itzak spoke quietly. “I need a visual.”
    “Bingwen,” said Kim. “I need you to point the pad over the wound for me and hold it there.”
    “Okay.”
    Itzak moved his hands through the holofield, and a holo of a man’s midsection appeared on the table. Kim had never gotten used to this part: performing surgery this way, without scrubbing up first, without a wall of equipment and monitoring devices around you.
    “Good, Bingwen. We can see your friend now,” said Kim. “What’s the name of the woman who’s helping you?”
    “Mingzhu.”
    “Is Mingzhu ready to begin?”
    She heard him speak in Chinese. A woman answered. Kim could here the stress in the woman’s voice.
    “She says she can’t go on.” The boy sounded panicked.
    “We need to get moving on this,” Itzak whispered. “There’s some light hemorrhaging here.”
    “Bingwen,” said Kim. “Listen to me. We need to do this right now. Do you understand? Tell Mingzhu that if she doesn’t act now your friend is going to die.”
    She heard Bingwen speak in Chinese again. But this time, he said a word that Kim did recognize, not a Chinese word, a name. It froze her heart.
    “Bingwen,” she said, her voice suddenly shaky. “What did you tell her? Give me the exact words you just said.”
    “I told her that if she didn’t help Mazer would die.”
    It was like the floor had dropped out beneath her. This couldn’t be. It was impossible, and yet completely possible.
    “Bingwen,” she said slowly. “What is your friend’s name? His full name.”
    “Mazer,” said the boy. “Mazer Rackham.”

CHAPTER 19
     
    MOPs
     
    Wit stood in front of the Chinese lieutenant’s desk at Khunjerab Pass, watching the lieutenant study Wit’s passport. The lieutenant was young, fresh out of officer’s training school probably, which was bad for Wit because it meant the kid would likely try extra hard to prove to his superiors that he was a capable commander of the border crossing. And what better way to prove his abilities than to arrest forty special-ops soldiers posing as civilians and trying to sneak their way into China?
    “You are American,” the lieutenant said. It wasn’t a question, so Wit didn’t respond.
    The kid’s English was good. A slight accent, but that was to be expected. Well educated obviously, and the perfect cut of his hair and the immaculate state of his uniform suggested a life of discipline. Wit figured he was probably the son of some well-to-do high-ranking officer or perhaps the nephew of some party official. A kid with connections. Someone had put in a good word and gotten him a decent command position right out of school. Not that Khunjerab Pass was any Shangri-La. It wasn’t. It was barren and cold and isolated and completely uninteresting. There were no forms of entertainment whatsoever, nothing to keep a soldier occupied after hours. There was the gate, there were the trucks that passed through the gate, and there were the mountains. The only break in the monotony was the occasional mountain goat sighting.
    But it was a command position. It might be a crappy one, but big careers had to start somewhere.
    “Why are you traveling into China?” the lieutenant asked.
    “We want to study the Formics,” said Wit. Which was true.
    The whole world was using that term now.