Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

El Cavador.”
    Lem cringed inside. El Cavador. He knew it wasn’t his fault that they had been destroyed—they should have gotten out when he did. Still, he couldn’t shake the nagging idea that he should have done more. What, he didn’t know; there was nothing else he could have done, really. There was no saving the men stuck on the Formic ship; they were beyond rescue. El Cavador should have seen that. But no, Concepción had adhered to some foolish, self-destructive notion of “never leave a man behind,” which was stupid. Lem was all for saving people, sure. But once it was clear that further rescue was impossible, what good was it to hang around? In the heat of the moment he had chided Chubs for ordering the ship to leave, but now he saw the wisdom of it. All El Cavador had accomplished by staying behind to rescue its men was its own sad demise.
    But that was free miners. He respected their courage. But to ignore self-preservation for the sake of family didn’t feel noble. It felt irresponsible.
    There was one more thing, too. One he tried not to think about, since it made him feel shallow and callous. But there was no denying it either: The destruction of El Cavador meant the destruction of their copy of his files. Concepción had said she would erase them, but now he knew without a doubt that it had happened. There was the slim possibility that one of the women had carried a copy onto the WU-HU ship, but that was unlikely. They were worried about protecting their children and surviving. Burning Lem Jukes at the legal stake hadn’t been on their minds. He was in the clear. The files were gone.
    “My point is,” Dublin was saying, “we don’t yet know why they’re headed to Earth. What do they want? Our resources? To make contact? To study us?”
    “They didn’t come to make contact,” said Lem. “Their pod destroyed the Italian free miners.”
    “Yes,” said Dublin, “but only after it had been among them for twelve hours. Maybe it was trying to contact them in all that time.”
    Lem shook his head. “Concepción told us everything. The Italians didn’t pick up anything that resembled communication from the pod.”
    “Maybe they have a way of communicating that we don’t know about,” said Dublin. “Maybe they were trying to communicate, but humans don’t have the tech to receive their transmissions.”
    “They killed the Italians,” said Chubs. “If someone doesn’t answer your hello, you don’t waste them.”
    “I’m trying to look at this scientifically,” said Dublin.
    “It doesn’t matter if they tried to communicate or not,” said Chubs. “They wanted to kill us. Did you watch the vids? Did you see the face of that Formic climbing up the mooring cable? It wasn’t coming to introduce itself. It was coming to rip Lem’s head off.”
    Dublin held up two hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not defending them. I’m reminding us that they come from a completely different social structure with completely different behaviors and values.”
    “There is one theory we haven’t discussed,” said Benyawe. She walked to the sketch of the Formic ship on the wall, studied it, then faced them. “What if it’s a colony ship?”
    “Colony?” said Chubs. “Can’t be. The planet’s taken. We own it. No vacancy.”
    “Maybe they don’t care,” said Benyawe. “Maybe they come from a civilization where aliens share planets.”
    “Or maybe they intend to take it for themselves,” said Lem. He turned and studied the diagram of the Formic. “We’ve been assuming all this time that they consider us as equals. But what if they don’t? What if they think of us in the same way we think of houseflies or rabbits? If you want to build a house on a lot and you find a family of rabbits living on the land, you don’t think of the land as belonging to the rabbits and build elsewhere. You shoot the rabbits or you scare them off.”
    “There are twelve billion people on Earth,” said Chubs. “With cities and industry and tech. That’s more than a family of rabbits.”
    “Fine. Pick a different animal. Say, earthworms. How many worms are on the plot of land? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or what about ants? A million? They have colonies and homes, but what do we care? We level the land and build anyway. My point is, maybe they don’t consider the planet ours. We only happen to live there. Maybe they see it as theirs for the taking.”
    “There’s a hole in that