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nine hundred meters across. It was just as the Formics had left it three years ago when one of their landers had lifted off from this spot and headed back into space to fight Mazer and the Mobile Operations Police, or MOPs, at the scout ship. The crater was visible from space. It stood out like a bullet wound to Earth, a reminder of how unstoppable the enemy had been, how technologically superior.
    Bingwen moved along the safety fence, making his way toward the scaffolding staircase that led down to the crater floor. In the moonlight he could make out hundreds of tunnel entrances at the bottom of the hole, as if an army of monster groundhogs had had a field day here.
    Bingwen smiled. Groundhogs. If only.
    He reached the staircase and clattered down to the bottom. The soil at the floor of the crater was hard-packed clay, dried in the sun. Bingwen flipped on his helmet light and saw hundreds of tunnel entrances on the ground ahead of him, as if he were standing on a giant sieve. The Chinese had built complex surface-drainage systems around the site to funnel rainwater away from the crater, as well as another drainage system on the floor of the crater between all the tunnel entrances, using narrower pipe. The result was a piping system that branched out in every direction in front of him and worked surprisingly well. Some water did get down into the tunnels, but pumps sucked the water away and discouraged erosion and flooding.
    Bingwen’s tunnel was in the center of the crater. He reached it by walking atop the drainage pipes, turning one way and then another like a well-trained mouse in an elaborate maze. A tall pyramidal iron structure stood over the top of the tunnel entrance. A winch was secured to the bottom of the structure, allowing soldiers to hook in and descend down into the darkness. Bingwen snapped the winch’s D-ring onto his climbing harness and lowered himself into the hole.
    The shaft wasn’t much wider than the span of his arms, but if Bingwen kept his limbs close to his body he could easily avoid the narrow ledges and rocks that jutted out from the wall every few meters or so. Bingwen imagined the Formics using these ledges to descend, dropping from one ledge to the next like monkeys swinging down to the lower branches of a tree with a fluid, swift grace.
    The Formics had likely come up the shafts the same way, leaping from one ledge to the next, their strong forelimbs pulling them upward with that same easy grace. Bingwen knew the Formics had the strength for it. As a tagalong and then an adopted member of the Mobile Operations Police, he had witnessed dozens of engagements with the enemy in China. He had seen the Formics’ clenched fists pound on soldiers in the heat of battle, exuding a brutality and strength far greater than their diminutive size suggested.
    His feet touched bottom, and he unhooked the D-ring. To his right, installed on the tunnel wall, was a thin projection tube that extended into the tunnel and disappeared from sight. Bingwen took the cable from the winch and hooked it to the small transmission device mounted at the base of the projection tube, nearly hidden from view.
    Then he turned and faced the tunnel leading away from the shaft. It was only a meter tall, so Bingwen got down on all fours and crawled forward. Most adults could crawl through these taller tunnels, but there were some places that required them to get on their bellies and squirm. Bingwen had a much easier time. There were even places where he could stand and crouch slightly and continue on foot.
    He reached the spot where the tunnel forked into four different passageways. He took the one on the far right, a slightly descending tunnel full of twists and dips and intersections, the light from his helmet cutting through the darkness. Without mapping equipment, one could easily get lost down here. The special ops teams knew that fact well. One of their favorite training exercises was to lead a man deep into the