“Remember, don’t touch off the ignition—”
“. . . until the air is releasing, I know, I know.”
Colby slapped the cylinder, then grabbed the lift yoke. It was a standard model, used to lift up to 500 kg. He’d never liked the loss of mobility the leg braces created, but he’d be a lot more mobile than if he was horsing the cylinder on his own.
He picked up his cylinder, locking it into the harness. This left an arm free to hold the wand. Grabbing six grenades, he slipped each one into a separate compartment.
There was a loud crash as the back wall gave in.
“You ready?” he asked Topeka.
“It’s go-go time,” she shouted, using the pet phrase of Major Mountie, Space Explorer.
He managed not to roll his eyes. He hated that asinine, juvenile series.
“You’re not maneuverable enough to stay inside here. Go outside, then move to the left to engage. I’ll take care of these,” he said, wheeling to face the back of the control room.
She nodded, then drove her little forklift out the door.
Colby readied his wand, then stepped forward to join the battle.
When Colby was a young lieutenant, zombie flicks had been popular, with mindless undead pursuing dwindling numbers of the living. As the plant soldiers pulled themselves through the wall with green leafy arms, he was struck by how close the image looked like old zombies breaking into houses, singularly intent on devouring brains.
He shook his head to clear the vision, then opened up the compressed air. A moment later, the jet caught the flammable jelly, sending it out to splash on the enemy. He thought he saw a few of the plant-things flinch, but before he could contemplate the significance of that, he touched off the jelly. Immediately, a rush of flame reached out, so hot the heat against his face made him flinch.
The plants went up most satisfyingly. Within ten seconds, every one of them was on fire, a few staggering, but most slumped to the floor, rapidly disintegrating under the onslaught.
“Get some!’ he shouted, stepping forward to give him a better field of fire to outside the broken wall.
More of the plants walked forward into the flame, and Colby felt a rush of exultation. His flamethrower was working, and the stupid things were helpless before him.
And then there were none in view. He kept the stream going for a moment, but he didn’t have an unlimited amount of fuel or compressed air, so he cut off the flow. The floor in front of him, as well as the inner walls near the break, were still on fire, the acrid smoke making his eyes burn.
For a moment, he thought he might have defeated the enemy, but through tearing eyes, he could still see masses of green just out of reach of his flamethrower. He edged to the side to give himself a better angle, and suddenly, the attention of the plants seemed to shift away from him. Almost in unison, the mass started to the right.
Topeka!
He’d told her to take her forklift in that direction, and he knew she was engaging. Taking one of his grenades, he armed and tossed it out through the break in the wall, almost hitting the edge and bouncing it back to his feet, but the grenade landed outside with a satisfying explosion, blowing bits of green into the air. The mass continued to move, though, and Colby knew he couldn’t do much from inside the building. He needed broader fields of fire.
“Come on, Duke!” he shouted, wheeling around, pushing against the inertia of his flamethrower.
The dog was nowhere in sight, but he didn’t have time to look for her. He almost stumbled out the door, then turned right. With Topeka on the other side of the building, he wanted to hit the mass of plant soldiers from their rear.
It was taking him a bit of effort to deal with the Daihatsu lifter. The 100-kg flamethrower might feel like it weighed 15 or 20 kg, but like the cargo pod, the mass was the mass. That didn’t change. Colby had to lean into the turn to horse the thing around the corner of the building, then sprint along the side and to the front. He could see plant soldiers moving as a single unit towards the south and where Topeka would be hitting them. As soon as he was in range, he opened the air, igniting the flames once the slightly pink jelly shot out.
And, of course, he forgot about his momentum. Not only was turning difficult, but so was stopping. He was barely able to nudge his direction to the side in order to avoid the burning jelly and plant-soldiers on the ground as he rushed forward. His unprotected face blistered in the heat.
He forced the pain from his mind as he spun around, swinging his wand to lay down sheets of fire. Ahead of him, near the far side of the building, ropes of flame revealed where Topeka engaged the plants.
There had to be hundreds of the enemy between them, and for a moment, Colby thought the two humans had them trapped, but as he swung his wand to the right, he caught a glimpse of hundreds more of the plant-soldiers peeling off around the launch terminal.
At that moment, it sunk in. He’d assumed that the slower-moving enemy were mindless, automatons like the zombies in the flicks. But that had been a mistake. What he was seeing was tactics, pure and simple. The enemy between Topeka and him were a fixing force while the main body was maneuvering to envelope her. Coming up from behind her, she couldn’t fire in two directions at once, and she’d be engulfed.
Never underestimate your enemy, Edson! he reminded himself.
Topeka wouldn’t know she was in deep shit, and he was not about to let her be overrun. With his right hand controlling the flames, he tossed each of his remaining grenades in front of him, sending up gouts of plant tissue and green mist.
“I’m coming in for you!” he shouted, trying to get her attention so she didn’t crisp him in her battle fury.
He could just see the top of the forklift, but the wall of flame that had been swinging towards him reversed course. Leaning forward, he pushed ahead, gaining speed and momentum, keeping his own flame to Topeka’s left. He crashed through a line three deep of the plant soldiers, almost breaking into the clear beside her. One plant had managed to grasp the edge of his lifter, and amazingly, started to bodily pivot Colby around. He could sense he was getting dragged back, and he tried to bring his wand to bear, but the thing was too close, and the flames were shooting over it.
Colby was about to shuck the lifting harness when a string of fire, much depleted from what it should be, splashed the plant, and it recoiled, letting him go.
Topeka had come to his rescue, but in doing so, had opened her back, just as the flanking plant soldiers rounded the launch terminal.
“Behind you!” he shouted, unable to engage with her between the enemy and him.
Topeka’s look of jubilation at having saved his ass turned to fear as she saw the enemy converge on her. She swung her wand, but barely a dribble of flame shot out for five meters, well short of the threat. Colby’s flamethrower still had a good charge, but either she’d expended much more of her air then he had or he’d just not put as much into hers.
With a sweep to his left, he bolted forward to her, shouting, “I’ve got your six. Now, back out of here.”
She didn’t argue, which was a relief. With a curt nod, she put the forklift into reverse. Colby followed, back to her as he sprayed one swipe after the other, trying to slow down the onslaught.
He couldn’t keep it up. The plant soldiers moved slower than a human could, but they were fast enough to close the distance with him walking backwards.
“Can’t that thing go any faster?” he asked her.
“This is about it,” she answered, her voice cracking from the stress.
She tried another shot, but the flame quit after only a second. She was out of either fuel or compressed air.
Colby flamed five of the closest enemy, then looked back. They were about to be cut off, with only a tight seven or eight-meter lane alongside the eastern wall of the building. Then something else caught his eyes. Beyond the attackers, over where the other plants had looked to be somehow merging their bodies, two green figures rose, and his stomach churned. They h
ad to be standing ten meters tall. As he watched a huge leafy hand reached down out of his line of sight, then reappeared with a piece of plant-part. It stuck the part to its side, held it for a moment, then released. The piece of plant was absorbed into the huge body. The other giant rummaged in the remains for additional parts as well. If those two joined the fight, Colby’s little flamethrower wasn’t going to do him much good.
He didn’t try and analyze the situation. He didn’t weigh the pros and cons of various courses of action. He made the decision before he really thought through the problem.
“Get out of the lift and run for it!” he shouted in his best voice of command, one that brooked no dissent.
With a smooth movement, he shucked his lift assist, clamping down the wand release and pushing it forward. The stream of flame acted like a tug-bot motor, slowly rotating it back towards him. He didn’t try and correct it. Either he was fast enough to make it clear or he wasn’t, and hesitating would seal the deal. He bolted after Topeka, watching out of the corner of his eyes as the flame slowly moved to intercept him.
It also incinerated the plant soldiers that were reaching out for him as he sprinted. He expected either the grasp of green strength or the kiss of fire to bring him down, but somehow, with only centimeters to spare, he managed to avoid death. The hair on the back of his head felt as if it’d been singed, but he was in the clear, pelting after a surprisingly quick Topeka.
And then he remembered his remaining grenades.
“Wait!” he shouted, but she wasn’t slowing down.
He’d managed to open up some space around him, so he turned to the right and ran down the length of the back wall. Stopping just short of the door, he peeked inside. The front wall and the control room had been destroyed, and he could see movement all the way through the building, but otherwise the room was empty. He darted in, then swept the grenades back into the carrying case.
“Easy, boy. Don’t set them off now.”
He knew he didn’t have time, but he’d be naked without a weapon. Poking his head out of the door, he could see that twenty or thirty of the enemy had cleared the corner of the building. From this side of the building, he didn’t see the two giants, but knew they would be coming.
“This way!” Topeka shouted at him. “We’ve got to lead them the fuck away from here.”
She was standing by the ruined shell of Warehouse B, frantically waving her arm for him to join her. He didn’t know where she was heading, but anyplace had to be better than where he was.
Marines never liked to retreat. It wasn’t in their DNA. But sometimes, discretion was the better part of valor, and with Riordan in the med chamber somewhere in the building, she was right. If the man was going to survive, the two of them had to clear the area. Without any more flames, they had to act the rabbit.
I might as well get their attention, he told himself as he lowered the case and took out one of the grenades.
He arched it in a beautiful throw, landing it right at the leading edge of the oncoming enemy. Colby knew that the plant soldiers were latched onto them and he hadn’t needed the grenade, but it sure felt good to see salad being made before he took off to follow Topeka. The plant bastards would follow at their own pace.
Interlude II: Harvest
Telemetry flowed to the Gardener’s vessel, chemical signals released by the mature plants resulting from the second wave of spores it had unleashed during the previous dark cycle. The vessel processed them without judgment, collating and compiling information and feeding it to the roots of the Gardener’s navigation locker. Information could be a form of nourishment, but these reports soured rather than fueled the Gardener. Despite its earlier suppositions, its unleashed tools had not encountered any Mechanicals. The remnants of their limited visual processing described only a handful of pathetic, right-angled structures, the sort of boxes that Meat created when given the chance. That, and a single massive structure that had somehow launched a pod of its own through the atmosphere and into the surrounding space. The Gardener’s own craft had lost track of the thing. One moment it had been clearing the world’s exosphere and when scans next swept that location where it should have been, it had vanished. The Gardener spared a few cycles to review the pod’s trajectory and extrapolate its location in space, but further scans were fruitless. It couldn’t be found anywhere. Strange.
Stranger still, the force it had planted to dismantle those offending structures had failed. A significant portion had expired prematurely, releasing chemo-signatures into the air tallying their demise. Mechanicals would never have bothered engaging vegetation and Meat lacked the sophistication to offer a challenge to such a degree. Strangest of all though was that the remainder of its tools had turned from their task, the destruction of the structure responsible for the now-missing pod. Instead of completing the disassembly, the survivors had abandoned the converging ring formation the Gardener had encoded into their spores and reformed into a ragged line that hurtled across an open plain toward the edge of a forest. Pointless. This planting, even more than the first one, had limited resources of strength and duration. More than half would exhaust themselves before they had crossed even half the distance. Worse still, those that endured and entered the forest would be lost to its sensors, their chemical telemetry absorbed and blocked by the trees above them.
Something had gone wrong. A string of somethings, in fact, and two rounds of purge agents had not resolved the discrepancies. The second planting would not, could not, deviate from their coded tropism without a compelling stimulus. Another something even now led them into the forest, subverting the mindlessness that should have been sufficient to the task at hand.
The Gardner roused itself to fuller wakefulness within its navigation pod. It considered the imperfection of its results. Perhaps it had erred, reacting too directly to the intrusion in its garden. A literal perspective rarely served. After all, its art thrived on the figurative. It opened itself to the memories of past cycles of growth and found a metaphor from its earliest teacher, a memory it had tucked away in ages past for just such a need as it now felt.
Where the branches cannot reach, the roots must dive deeper.
Then too, perhaps not quite so figurative after all. The Gardener released chemical signals to the receptors of its navigation locker. The vessel responded to the commands and slipped from orbit, spiraling soundlessly downward into the atmosphere, targeting the same copse of trees that had captivated the remnant of the second planting. To understand the situation, the Gardener would have to descend to the planet’s surface and resolve the matter within the forest itself. Only then could it return to tending the garden it planned for this world.
Part III: Resolution and Threat
“Are they still following?” Topeka asked, her breath coming hard.
“You just keep moving,” Colby told her, “And let me worry about them.”
Duke yipped with an enthusiasm she’d never displayed before. Apparently fleeing an alien invasion had inspired her. She had rejoined them as they ran through the rubble just ahead of the plants. Together, the three had crossed the open area surrounding the station, pulling farther ahead of their pursuers. That had started to change. Topeka was struggling, now. She’d proven herself to be a hardass during the fight, but too many hours sitting in her control seat had cut into her fitness. Despite having at least 30 years on her, his daily exercise routine had kept him in excellent shape, and he’d barely broken a sweat.
“Can we stop for a minute?” Topeka asked, barely getting the words out as they reached the far treeline, about four klicks from the station.
Colby wanted to keep running, but slowed. He’d lose her otherwise.
“OK, but just for a minute,” he said as she came to a stop and bent over, hands on her knees.
Duke ran up to her and licked her face.
Colby looked back along the way they’d come. The mass of smaller plants had actually followed them out of the station complex, away from Rior
dan in his med chamber. Even with Topeka huffing and puffing, they’d opened up at least a two-klick gap between them and the pursuers. But something had changed. The main body of plants chasing them had thinned out. Those in the front continued in their pursuit, but those towards the rear were barely moving. Some of those had fallen, and through the gaps in the front line, Colby could see them lay prone on the ground. Even as he watched, more of those in the front ranks started to fall back. Colby wondered if the plants had varying degrees of fitness just as the two humans had.
Towards the rear of the pack, the two giants had slowed as well, but remained clearly focused on them. Then, with no warning, one ponderously turned and lumbered back the way it had come, returning to the station. The other one kept oriented towards them for a long 20 seconds. At the risk of anthropomorphizing the things, Colby thought it reluctantly turned to join the other, heedlessly smashing some of its smaller brethren. But where the small ones were dropping like flies, the giants didn’t move as if they were fatigued.
“You doing OK?” he asked Topeka as he watched the giants walk back into the station.
“Yeah. No. Shit, just give me another minute,” she said, anger dripping from her voice.
Colby watched her, evaluating her as he had many soldiers over the years. Was her anger at the plants or aimed at herself for not being able to keep up? Probably a bit of both. Anger was usually a liability in a battle, but if he could use it to keep her moving, he would.
“Those bastards . . .” he started, then stopped, looking out over the broken ranks of pursuing plants.
“Those bastards what?”
“Look at that. Some of them, they look like they’re decomposing,” he said.
It was true. While the closest few plants were still pursuing them, the ones farthest back, the ones that had fallen, were flattening out. Maybe a few had been smashed flat by the retreating giant, but most seemed to be wilting and breaking down. Wisps of green mist rose above the plant corpses before being dissipated by the breeze. Even the nearer plants that were still coming at them didn’t look healthy.
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