All he could do now was close his eyes, concentrate, and try to find the pattern in his rotations. Mazer’s equilibrium was gone in an instant. The capsule tumbled end over end, spinning in three dimensions through zero gravity. Mazer Rackham drifted away from the space station, sealed inside a capsule no bigger than a coffin, his weapons and gear pressed tight against him. Demosthenes, A History of the Formic Wars. She had intended to wield only her delicate, sacred ovipositor, but finding the way blocked, she drew her sword. With the approval of her sisters, she dismantled almost the entire apparatus of colonization and converted the materials of the vast mothership into the requisite number of invasion craft. Now, she and her sisters could reach back into their not-so-very-ancient memory of brutal wars between Hive Queens, which had spawned a sophisticated military technology. She had come in search of a place to spawn another iteration of the Formic civilization, a peaceful, domestic mission, or so she supposed. However, if there was one thing the Hive Queens were experts at, it was war. She immediately conferred with her sisters on all the other populated planets, showing them how the humans had behaved, the structure of their bodies, the weapons they had used.Ĭolonization of new worlds always brought challenges that required improvisation, but now for the first time a Formic colony was encountering friction that was intelligent, organized, and effective. Not only would she arrive at this new planet without the native biota already having been replaced by compatible life-forms, but she would also be forced to approach it with an effective military strategy. Then the humans blew out the interior of the advance ship and killed every last one of her workers. Later we would learn that the Hive Queen commanded her workers through philotic connections that seemed not to attenuate or slow down with distance signals from the human brain take longer to reach our fingers than it took the Hive Queen to receive sensory information from her workers, learn that the pesky native life-form was resisting the advance ship’s ministrations, and repurpose those workers as soldiers. We eked out our victory against an enemy whose commander-whose mind-was millions of kilometers away. The Hive Queen did not view her actions as an attack, but rather as a leisurely beginning to the formification of Earth. The Formic invaders had the capacity to destroy all life that was based on our particular array of amino acids, which, being indigestible to them, was not worth preserving. The First Formic War was a close-fought thing. Will Bingwen, Mazer Rackam, Victor Delgado and Lem Juke be able to divert those very human enemies in time to create a weapon that can effectively defend humanity in the inexorable Second Formic War?
But there is an enemy within, an enemy as old as human warfare: ambition and politics. There’s a Polemarch, responsible for organizing all the military forces of the planet into the new International Fleet. There is now a Hegemon, a planetary official responsible for keeping all the formerly warring nations in line. There is a mothership out beyond the Solar System’s Kuiper Belt, and it’s heading into the system, unstoppable by any weapons that Earth can muster.Įarth has been reorganized for defense. The Scouring of China struck fear into the other nations of the planet that fear blossomed into drastic action when scientists determined that the single ship that wreaked such damage was merely a scout ship. China has been devastated by the Formic’s initial efforts to eradicate Earth life forms and prepare the ground for their own settlement. The first invasion of Earth was beaten back by a coalition of corporate and international military forces, and the Chinese army.
#RAINFALL TOTALS LAST 24 HOURS SERIES#
Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston return to their Ender’s Game prequel series with this first volume of an all-new trilogy about the Second Formic War in The Swarm.
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