by B. V. Larson
Anne hauled him up into a sitting position. Claver hissed. I took his arm and looked meaningfully at Anne. “I’ll take it from here.”
She looked doubtfully from Claver to me then to Winslade, who was just arriving. Winslade had a grim expression on his face.
She put her hands on her hips and sighed. “If you’re just going to recycle him again, why did you bother going through all this trouble to mess up my schedule?”
“Because,” Claver answered, his eyes still squinched tightly, “they’ll doctor the records afterward. A few bad grows, no ID assigned. Nothing to show I was ever here.”
The funny thing was that Claver might be right. I’d suffered just such a fate a year or so back when people had wanted to question me. It gave me pause and made me doubt my actions. Was this revenge-related? Claver may have had something to do with the perming of my family, but I couldn’t be rock-solid certain of that.
Sternly, I told myself we had to do what we had to do. Claver had caused a lot of deaths back on Tau Ceti before this—hell he’d even gotten a load of squids, Nairbs and saurians killed on Machine World.
Half-lifting him off the table, I helped him to the lockers where a smart cloth jumper was applied. It wrapped itself over his body, and Winslade made a flicking gesture toward the hatch.
“My office,” Winslade said.
Claver perked up when he heard Winslade’s voice. “Is that the venerable Primus?” he asked. “Or perhaps you’ve been elevated to the rank of Tribune by now?”
“To you, I’m God,” Winslade said.
We left the revival chamber, abandoning Anne to her grim work. She looked after us fretfully. I knew she didn’t like any kind of mistreatment. She especially felt protective of those she’d returned to life personally. Some part of her brain believed she’d mothered us all, I think.
We reached Winslade’s office a minute later. Claver was still limping, and he’d only forced his eyes once or twice.
“Snap out of it, Claver,” Winslade said. “We know you’re a good grow.”
“My eyes—they burn this time. You ever get that? Sometimes you can’t take light at all. Can you dim the interior?”
Winslade and I exchanged glances. It could be true. Fresh-grown eyes were often sensitive, like nerves severed and later reknit. They sent odd signals to the mind until they settled in.
“It could be true, sir,” I said to Winslade. “I’ve had trouble with my eyes at times.”
Winslade gave Claver an appraising glance. I noticed Winslade had his sidearm in his hand.
After a moment of hesitation, Winslade reached for the light panel. But before he touched the pad and lowered the lights, he reversed himself and jabbed the muzzle of his sidearm into Claver’s gut.
The prisoner made a woofing sound and coughed. His eyes opened wide, and he made choking sounds.
“Changed your mind, sir?” I asked the Primus.
Winslade pointed with one thin-boned finger at Claver’s hand. I looked down and watched as Claver’s hand retreated from my belt.
“He went for your weapon when I reached for the lights. You’re overconfident with those big muscles of yours, Veteran. They won’t do you any good at all with your brains splattered on the ceiling.”
I nodded tightly. “Thank you, sir.”
Winslade prodded Claver methodically with the barrel of his gun.
“Let’s have a little talk, shall we?” he asked.
“What for? You’ve already made up your minds. Just record my confession or whatever you want and blow my brains out. My eyes really do burn. I’m ready to recycle right now.”
“What happened aboard the freighter?” Winslade asked.
“We were attacked and robbed. It was piracy, plain and simple.”
Winslade sighed. “Let’s be more specific. Start with your personal story.”
“He’s just going to make something up,” I commented.
“We’ll get to the truth in time,” Winslade said dispassionately, “but we might as well start with his fabricated version first. I find it’s cathartic for some criminals.”
Claver looked from one of us to the next. There was no pity in our eyes now. He’d lost all of mine when he’d tried to grab my gun.
“All right,” he said, judging it was time to say his piece. “It was weird, actually. Pod-like things attached themselves to the ship as we left warp. They burned through the hull very quickly. The ship was a freighter—we didn’t have much in the way of weapons or troops, just a few onboard marines. My entire crew was overwhelmed and killed. I died on the bridge giving orders.”
Winslade nodded thoughtfully. “What killed you, specifically?”
“Some kind of gas got into the vents. We didn’t have our vac suits on—stupid, I know. I think the fumes were created by an acidic fluid the creatures emitted.”
“That’s it?” Winslade asked his eyebrows lifting high.
“Yeah, that’s it. To repeat, we came out of warp near Earth, and these pod creatures jumped us—then I died. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“You lost the shipment,” I said. “The freighter crashed into the spaceport and killed about thirty thousand people.”
“Thirty thousand?” Claver asked, impressed.
“At least. Many of them were permed. Two legions were in attendance to ceremonially welcome your death ship.”
“What do plants want with metal in any case?” Winslade asked.
We both looked at him.
“That ship they used to follow my freighter and attack,” Claver said, “it was metal, or at least it had some metal parts.”
Winslade nodded. “I suppose some parts of a starship have to be metal.”
“There you have it,” Claver said with a helpless shrug. “It was a tragedy all the way around. You gentlemen have my utmost sympathy. If this briefing is over, I’d like to recover in my stateroom—”
Winslade’s gun jabbed him again. This time, it was a hard poke in the ribs. Claver grunted and clutched a spot there. As I watched, it began to ooze blood and turn purple.
“As I said,” Winslade commented in a languid voice, “it will take time to get to the truth. Fortunately, I have time.”
Claver’s eyes were wide open now. He looked like a caged animal. I did my best to look unsympathetic, but I was starting to feel he’d told his story. It sounded real enough.
“Varus bastards,” Claver said. “What do you want me to say? If the truth isn’t good enough for you, maybe you should just write it down for me so I can sign it. That would save us all a lot of time and trouble.”
Winslade lowered his gun. Instead of aiming it at Claver’s gut, he aimed it at his foot. “You have far too many toes, in my opinion. We’ll begin removing the excess shortly. Every thirty seconds, I’ll remove another, until we run out. Then, we’ll stop for some blood-staunching and get to work on these fingers—I might have to reload as well.”
There was steel in Winslade’s eye, I could see it. He might be an arrogant prick, but he had a spine when it came to dealing out pain.
Claver saw it too. He believed, and he buckled.
“You prick,” he said. “I was on the ship. I died there—just like I said. What else do you want from me?”
“I want to hear what you know about these creatures. Why might they be following you? Why did they attack you, and how did they come to be here on this world that was supposedly uninhabited?”
“I never said I was out here at all—wherever here is. I told you, I was on my way to Earth—”
Winslade nuzzled Claver’s toes with the barrel of his pistol. Claver twitched while Winslade remained strangely expressionless.
“I’m getting bored,” Winslade said, selecting a toe. It was the middle one on Claver’s left foot. “Hold him, Veteran.”
“They’re called the Wur,” Claver said suddenly. “It’s a squid word, I believe. Basically, they’re pod people. They come from beyond our frontier.”
&nbs
p; “All right then,” Winslade said. “We’re getting somewhere. Where are these creatures from?”
“I don’t know.”
Winslade walked angrily to his desk and brought up a star map.
“This is where we are now, Claver,” he said, tapping the K-Class star labeled L-374. What do you know about it?”
Claver eyed the map. “Out there, huh? That planet is uninhabited.”
“Wrong,” Winslade said. “The planet was marked as uninhabited because that was true when it was last surveyed by the empire. But that was probably three hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution back on Earth. Can you explain the discrepancy?”
“Maybe. Three hundred years…that’s plenty of time for the Wur to seed a planet.”
A whisper of a smile played on Winslade’s mouth. “I’m a little surprised,” he said. “I honestly thought I’d have to remove appendages before you’d confess to treason.”
“First off,” Claver retorted, “I only talked because I know you’re a cold snake that would actually follow through.”
“And you were correct.”
“But secondly, I have to ask, Primus, by what stretch of the imagination does my helpful information amount to treason?”
Winslade sucked in a breath through his narrow nostrils. He raised a skinny index finger to his nose and tapped it there. “You could not have this information without having dealt with this enemy. Clandestine interactions with a renegade alien species amount to treason—not just on Earth but by the laws of the Galactic Empire itself. Further, you withheld information concerning this enemy when first questioned. Let us call that a second count of treason.”
“Let’s not,” Claver said. “Okay, you have me—or at least this version of me. Let’s talk business. I want a signed immunity agreement. Then I’ll tell you what else I know.”
“I have another proposal,” Winslade said, his eyes flashing dangerously.
At that moment, Winslade’s tapper began beeping. I knew that sound. There was an emergency call coming in.
Winslade stepped away and consulted his arm. Mine began flashing and beeping as well.
We both looked up at one another at the same moment after reading the incoming priority message.
The giants from the forest—they were on the march.
-20-
About five minutes after I left Winslade to continue Claver’s interrogation, I found myself manning a trench line we’d hastily dug with the aid of our “pigs.”
Pigs were huge walking drones that buzzed and revved. They were still digging, carving up the soft dark loam of the forest floor into curling rolls of dirt. Using something on the front of the machines that looked like a plowshare, the earth was gouged and thrown up in the direction of the wild forest.
The hole behind me was over a meter deep. The dirt pile on the forest side formed a handy barrier we could rest our rifles on. Already the pigs had dug a double-ringed defensive earthwork that encircled the lifter that rested on its struts in the middle.
I didn’t think our dug-in defenses were going to do us much good against the giant aliens, however. Unlike the techs driving the drones and most of our officers, I’d actually seen and done battle with one of these giants. I knew they would step right over these trench-lines—or worse, step down into them, crushing us.
So far, the pod creatures had yet to show themselves. My helmet-based tactical display indicated they were out there, but I couldn’t see them yet due to what might be called “undergrowth” in this forest of immense proportions. Fern-like plants ten meters high were everywhere, blocking my vision and generally getting in the way.
“How is this even possible?” Carlos demanded of no one in particular. He’d been revived by the time we returned to the lifter, before Winslade and I had commandeered the machine that doled out life in order to revive Claver.
Fresh from a violent death, Carlos’ voice seemed less confident than usual.
“How’s what possible, Specialist?” I asked.
“How can these tree-aliens move at all? I mean, they’re just plants, right? They haven’t got any muscles! I don’t get it.”
Kivi spoke up right away. “You took xenobiology,” she said. “Were you paying any attention? Our pigs don’t have muscles either, but they can also move. Those machines back on Gamma Pavonis moved very quickly too.”
“Yeah, but these things are freaking trees. It’s not the same.”
He had a point, and I didn’t have an answer. Natasha came to my rescue.
“I’ve been running tests on the samples I took,” she said. “We don’t know everything yet, but as far as I can tell, they have something like nanotubes inside their tough exterior. You saw that material that looked like corn silk, right? That stuff contracts when stimulated. Each strand works like a thin muscle. Each of the thousands of string-like hairs are attached to two spots inside the tube-like outer structure. Working together, they cause the creatures to move.”
“You’re talking about nanotubes inside the trunk, right?” Carlos asked.
“The trunk and the limbs. They’re the same. Those arms that look like branches to us are really tubes of flexible cellulose. Think about them as tough rubber hoses filled with strands of nano-fiber. It’s a marvelous system whether it was designed, or it evolved naturally.”
Her last comment sparked my interest. “You still think these things might be bio-engineered?”
“It’s possible,” she said. “We just don’t know enough yet.”
“Well,” I said, sighting along my rifle barrel, “I think we’re about to get schooled.”
There was a distant movement, a shivering of the tallest ferns to the south. I focused on that region as it was directly ahead and part of our designated firing zone.
“They’re creeping up on us,” Carlos said suddenly.
There was a certainty in his voice that got my attention.
“Do you see something, Specialist?”
He never got the chance to answer. At that moment, Natasha reported in, updating my tactical screen. The techs had sent out a skirmish-line of buzzers into the deep forest to watch for trouble. She relayed the live feed to her commanders—including me.
Sure enough, the tree things were advancing toward us on all fours. They lit up on my helmet’s tactical display with red arrows pointing down to their tracked positions. I did a quick count. There were about twenty contacts coming toward our unit’s portion of the defensive line. There had to be more than a hundred circling the entire camp.
“Hold your fire until they break into the open,” I said. “We want to hit them hard and all at once. If they come in a little closer, they won’t be able to turn around and run.”
“I don’t like this,” Kivi said, breathing hard over her microphone. “They’re intelligent. The one that we killed didn’t seem too smart—but this behavior, these things are coordinating. I don’t think they’re simple animals.”
“Agreed,” Natasha said. “They’re clearly intelligent beyond the animal level. As to the behavior of the first one, remember it was a newborn. How smart were you thirty seconds after birth?”
They both had made good points, and I didn’t like any of them. I’d hoped the enemy would be as dumb as the trees they resembled. The mere fact that creatures made of cellulose were creeping up on us as an organized group was, well, creepy. How did they communicate? Who was leading them?
I gave my head a little shake to get back into the game. The here and now was all that mattered. There wasn’t time to have a scientific debate about the enemy. All we could do was wait for their charge.
They didn’t take long to begin the attack. Almost as one, they rose up above the ferns they’d been hiding behind. I heard a ripping roar of gunfire as hundreds of soldiers opened up all around us. We were blazing away like there was no tomorrow—and with only one lifter and one revival machine, we might be right.
Thousands of tracing rounds leapt through the air from the squads
around us. My reticle lit up indicating I was on target, and my team joined in.
The monsters were lumbering toward us. They were a little slow at first because they had to stand up from a hunched position and get their big legs moving.
The ten meter tall ferns of the forest came to the curved knees of the tree-creatures. I hadn’t really noticed before, but now that Natasha had explained they were boneless shells full of thousands of strand-like muscles, I could see they didn’t have joints. Their knees flexed in a curve rather than bending sharply in the middle. The effect was strange to witness, but it was also undeniably effective. They came at us at an alarming pace, tearing the ferns apart and brushing them aside. A combined warbling howl began as the charge became widespread. All of the creatures seemed to be letting loose at once. The sound could only be described as a battle cry.
Just one of these things could give you a headache, but a hundred of them? I wasn’t sure my eardrums would survive it. Men put their hands to their helmets and shouted in pain, but the monsters were making so much racket that our own screams couldn’t be heard. Our rate of fire slackened until it almost died out.
Fortunately, the aliens didn’t keep the howling up for long. They were moving faster now, orange fleshy fronds bouncing like leaves all over their strange bodies. Giant ferns whipped at those lanky, striding legs. I even saw several of them leap, soaring over gigantic roots.
Our small-arms fire wasn’t doing much. We fired into their mass but weren’t bringing anybody down.
“Sargon, burn the closest one. Squad, all follow his target. Everyone hit the one that he lights up—hit it hard!”
At first, our automatic fire slowed. Then when Sargon nailed the leader, we all lashed it with a storm of bullets, knocking it from its feet. It went down hard, thrashing and rolling. The next two monsters behind went down as well, tripped by the fallen leader.
“Focus on those three. Mark your targets. Follow my lead.”
I engaged a tactical option in my helmet’s battle system I’d never had cause to use before in infantry gear. The option made the arrow over the head of my target blink rapidly.
That got my whole squad to target the same alien. We hadn’t fought too many monsters that were so big we needed to use the system, but we needed it now. I’d used it before to coordinate fire on the biggest machines on Machine World, but I’d been driving a dragon then—and I wished I was driving a dragon right now. I’d have felt a lot safer.