Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

making a sweeping gesture with his arm, showing them the expected trajectory.
    Victor rotated the quickship so it was pointed in the direction to intercept the pod once it passed. Toron gazed outward with his visor zoomed to maximum, searching the sky for the pod, waiting. Father worked furiously behind Victor, making hooks for the cables. Using the shears, he snipped bars from the quickship’s walls and bent them with another hydraulic tool, jury-rigging a hook.
    A few minutes later Toron saw it.
    “There,” he said, pointing.
    Victor strained his eyes and zoomed in with his visor. At first he saw nothing. There was wreckage clouding his view, and the sunlight through the debris was dim and heavily dappled with long shadows that kept most of their surroundings in near darkness.
    Then he saw it. Or at least a glimpse of it, there in the distance, behind a scattering of debris, moving toward them.
    Then the debris thinned, and the whole pod came into view. Victor’s heart sank. It was a ship, yes, but with its grappling hooks and needle drills already extended, it looked more like a smooth-shelled insect. It wasn’t human. Whatever was inside it piloting it couldn’t be human. It wasn’t shaped for humans. It seemed too narrow in the body. And what was that on the nose of the ship? A drive? For the first time in Victor’s memory, he was mechanically stumped. Typically he could look at other ships and know just by the shape of them and the placement of their sensors and engines how the ship flew and operated. Even ships he had not read about and whose designs were completely foreign to him, even those Victor could understand if he looked at them long enough.
    Except this one. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. Had it not been flying through space in front of him, if he had seen only an image of it on the nets, he wouldn’t have believed it was a ship at all. He wouldn’t have believed it even existed.
    El Cavador can’t stop it, Victor realized. Concepción isn’t prepared for this. Nothing is prepared for this.
    “What the devil is that?” said Toron.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Father. “We don’t have to understand it. We just have to stop it. Check your safety harnesses. Make sure your cables are secure. If you’re not tethered and you slip, you’re gone. The ship will be moving. Use your hand and boot magnets. Strap a second pair of magnets to your knees. Stay as flat as you can. Crawl, don’t walk. Toron, once we land, bring out the tools. We’ll target the needle drills and grappling arms first.” Father reached up and turned on his helmet cam. He was going to record everything. “You can do this, Vico,” he said. “Wait for the pod to pass. Then pull up alongside it and land on its surface.”
    Yes, thought Victor. Land on its surface. How simple. Just plop a quickship—which was never intended to be piloted, never intended to hold people at all, and operated with rudimentary flight controls—onto a moving alien target. Easy.
    Victor watched the pod approach. It decelerated as it sunk into the debris cloud, yet it still moved faster than Victor thought safe for a debris field. It must be incredibly nimble, he thought. It must be able to shift direction quickly. And just as he considered this, it happened. The pod jinked and spun to avoid a chunk of debris and then returned to its previous trajectory with inhuman agility. Again, like a flying insect, zipping to the side and back with ease. How was he supposed to land on something that could change direction that fast?
    Ten seconds passed. The pod drew closer, getting larger. For a harrowing moment, Victor thought it was coming directly for them, that it had seen them moving through the debris and decided to attack them instead. But no, now it slowly began to veer to the side. They were beside its trajectory, not on it.
    Finally it passed by, not a hundred meters from their position, slick and smooth and moving fast.
    Victor slid his finger down the screen of his handheld, and the quickship shot forward. Earlier he had devised a dial to increase the propulsion by simply sliding his finger across the screen, but as soon as the ship took off, he knew that he had misjudged it: They were accelerating too quickly. He had intended to start slow and then rush at the end, but it was too late for that now. He would have to rely on retros to slow them down in the final moments just before impact.
    The quickship raced forward, not