Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

what they needed would be like finding needles in a haystack that had been ripped to shreds and strewn across a county mile, but he agreed to look nonetheless. When he and Victor came up empty-handed, Concepción convened the Council meeting.
    The nine Italian survivors who had been trapped in the wreckage were in attendance. They stood huddled together off to one side, the horror of their ordeal still evident on their faces. None of them had been terribly injured in the pod attack, but they looked like broken people nonetheless. Weeks ago, when the Italians had docked with El Cavador, the Italians had been full of song and laughter and life. Now they were like ghosts of the people they had been, silent and solemn and heavy of heart. For the past two days they had patiently awaited the return of the search party, desperate for news of lost loved ones. But both days had ended in disappointment, and now whatever hope they clung to had to be paper thin.
    “I’m ending the search for survivors,” said Concepción.
    Jeppe, an elderly Italian who had become a spokesman for the survivors, objected. “There have to be places we haven’t searched,” he said.
    “There aren’t,” said Concepción. “As painful as I know this must be, we all must accept facts and move forward.”
    “What about the bodies?” asked Jeppe. “We can’t leave them out there.”
    “We can and we will,” said Concepción. “The recovery effort could take weeks to conduct safely, and we’ve stayed here too long already. Under other circumstances I would agree, but these are not normal circumstances. We need to move now. I remind you that there are three members of my own family among the dead who have not been recovered. All of us are making sacrifices.”
    She meant Toron, Faron, and Janda. The miners never found Janda’s body in their searches, and now that the search was over, no one ever would. Victor felt a pang of guilt as he pictured Toron in his mind, dying there on the pod, pleading for Victor to find his daughter.
    Concepción continued. “Our primary mission now is to warn Earth and Luna and everyone in the Belts that this near-lightspeed ship is coming. The pod is incontrovertible evidence that the ship is alien and that the species flying it has malicious intent. If we had a laserline transmitter, we could send a warning immediately, but at the moment, we have no reliable long-range communication. The radio is working, but without a laserline, I doubt we’ll send a message at this distance with any accuracy. I suggest we set a course for Weigh Station Four and try to hail them as we approach. We can then use their laserline transmitter to send a warning from there.”
    “Agreed,” said Dreo. “But sending the warning via laserline isn’t a sure thing. We can’t count on our message getting through. We’re still a long way from Earth. Any message we send in that direction will have to pass through several hands and relay stations along the way before it reaches Earth. If the message isn’t passed on, if it stops somewhere along the chain, it dies there. It happens all the time. You know how these relay stations work. Corporates and paying accounts get top priority. Those are relayed first. The computers do that automatically. We’re free miners, the dregs of space, ignorant roughnecks. The station attendants would push our messages aside only to be sent out when the server space becomes available.”
    “We’ll mark the message as an emergency,” said Concepción. “We’ll tag it as high priority.”
    “Of course,” said Dreo. “But that’s overused. Some clans mark all of their messages as emergencies in hopes of getting top placement and being quickly sent through. Believe me, when I worked for corporates, I had to deal with these relay stations all the time. Seventy to eighty percent of the laserlines they get every day are marked as emergencies even though most of them aren’t. ‘Emergency’ means nothing.”
    “But we have an overwhelming amount of evidence,” said Father. “The helmet-cam footage shows that the pod had images of Earth. The Eye has given us mountains of data to suggest the ship is moving in that direction. We have eyewitness accounts of the pod attacking without provocation. We even have footage of the hormigas themselves. No one can refute this.”
    “Yes,” said Dreo, “but no one will know any of that until they open the message. Which these relay stations won’t do. And