Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series)

by Coy, David

  dominant species

  Volume Two

  edge effects

  David Coy

  Dominant Species Volume Two: Edge Effects

  Third Edition

  Copyright © 2007 by David Coy, All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher or the author, with the exception of brief quotes used in reviews. Contact the publisher for information on foreign rights.

  Cover art by Ivaylo Nikolov.

  For more information on this title, characters, and forthcoming books in this series, www.DominantSpeciesOnline.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-10: 1-4196-6838-2 EAN-13: 978-1-4196-6838-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007902031

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  To Merav

  The Dominant Species Series

  Volume One:

  Natural Selection

  Volume Two:

  Edge Effects

  Volume Three:

  Acquired Traits

  Nature does nothing uselessly. —Aristotle

  The year 3012

  1

  “Fire.”

  The charge went off with a dull thud that sent its pulse through Howard’s feet. He didn’t quite know how, but he could always tell when the shot was a good one. It was getting near dusk, and the bugs were fierce. He brushed a particularly nasty one away from his face netting so he could see. He leaned over the display and watched as the picture came back.

  “What are you getting?” Carla asked over his shoulder.

  “Not much. Marginal. Maybe enough.”

  “Hit the jackpot again, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Some bauxite, lead, even copper ore, I think. Look at this.”

  They watched the display as the shot’s resonance echoed through the subterranean layers and returned data to the sensors.

  “Is that it?” Carla asked, pointing to a spike on the screen.

  “Right. The copper.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  Howard flashed her a look. “Fire two and five. I want a good harmonic.”

  Carla worked the detonator, and a moment later two more charges thudded through the ground in quick succession.

  “There it is. It’s copper ore all right. One thin vein, about a hundred and forty meters thick. Low concentration but probably worth the effort.”

  “So long little planet,” she said without a hint of humor. “Maybe. Mining ain’t a pretty sight when it happens.”

  “Nope.”

  They studied the display a moment longer. Carla absently brushed a big ugly crawler from the screen.

  “That’s a hell of an admission from two geologists,” Howard said finally.

  Carla sucked a big breath through her nose and turned away, taking in a sweeping look at the jungle just meters outside the little clearing. “Did you ever see such plant and animal life, Howard? Look at this foliage! Christ, it would take a thousand years to catalog the plant life alone!”

  Howard acted as if he were barely hearing her.

  “There’s a bunch of it,” he said absently.

  “How long did it take to get like this? A billion years? Ten billion?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, five billion. I bet it took five billion years at least. Look at the ferns. They’re beautiful.”

  “Yep.”

  “And the blooms! Look at those blooms! I bet you couldn’t grow those anywhere else in the universe.”

  “Could be,” he said distractedly.

  “They should . . . they should turn this planet into a park, never to be dist . . . disturbed.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “They ought to just leave it alone.”

  “Not likely.”

  “It’s too beautiful, too . . . fertile . . .”

  She filled her lungs through her nose.” Smell!” she said, breathing in.” It’s like a greenhouse filled with orchids! Oh, smell that!”

  She was completely taken with the planet’s organic splendor. It had taken him hours to get her out of the jungle and focused on the business at hand.

  The jungle was remarkable.

  It was like the pictures he’d seen of the fabled Amazon basin, but thicker and higher, and it covered every square meter of the planet that wasn’t water. They’d flown for hours over the endless rolling sea of dark green, marveling at its uniformity and richness. They saw no mountains to speak of, just rolling, green terrain broken only by the irregular band of a shallow sea that wrapped the globe, or an occasional outcropping forced up from below. Patches of thick, low clouds drifted at treetop level and supplied a constant source of fresh rainwater. They watched lightning flash in continual bursts and felt the boom of thunder through the shuttle’s skin as they passed the storms. The planet was primordial. It boiled with unparalleled biological richness and vitality.

  The red sun shone its light and heat into that wet greenhouse, and the result was wild and wondrous growth. They’d been on the planet for less than twenty-four hours and had seen hundreds of alien insects and plants just in their immediate vicinity.

  “What happens to all this!” Carla exclaimed, her arms out wide.

  It was Howard’s turn to suck air. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said, frustrated with her idle, romantic talk.

  “You know as well as I do what’ll happen here,” she said.

  “I don’t know. This one’s pretty far. There’s not that much payload here, either. It’ll be costly to develop, more so than Fuji. But what do I know?”

  “But the payoff will be enormous, right? You as much as said so. You said copper. The distance and the cost is nothing compared to the copper.”

  What I said was that there’s not that much. I don’t know . . .”

  “Yes, you do.”

  Howard stuck his head back in the display pretending to study the data. “It’s not up to us.”

  “Howard, how much do they reduce your debt by doing this kind of work?”

  “A little more than you. What’s your point?”

  “You get pay downs even if you don’t find the gold, right?”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “I’m saying they don’t reduce our debt enough to do this kind of work.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I’m saying we could save it, Howard. All we have to do is send up bogus data from one of those dead balls we surveyed earlier this year, modified a little—you know—just to make it look real. I can do that.”

  “Send in bogus data?”

  “Yes! They’ll go away; they’ll leave it alone! And we’ll still get our reductions. What does it matter to Richthaus? Nobody would give a shit. They can find another planet to rape, not this one.”

  “They might put us in jail for that.”

  “So what?”

  “So what? I don’t want to go to jail—that’s so what. Forget it.”

  Carla stared at him for a moment, then turned around and ambled over to the shuttle, opened the hatch and went inside. “Crazy . . .” Howard said watching her.

  She’d always been a little on the fringe of things; somewhat disconnected fr
om the mainstream. Some would say a little out of focus. That trait might have been what attracted him to her in the first place.

  They’d met when she was working for her certification. Howard was her teacher at the time. To receive certification as Grade I Geology was difficult and demanding; not for the faint of heart or weak of will, and Carla barely made it. Her head was never quite with the program. She was just as interested in music as she was in geology—something Howard could never quite fathom. A-Grade at the time, Howard annotated her file and recommended that she spend another two years as an apprentice to him as a condition of certification. Since they were sleeping together by then anyway, it worked out just fine. She eventually caught on and received her grade. They were married a year after that.

  When he took the contract with Richthaus-Alvarez Mining and Exploration, he negotiated for a personal assistant. Carla was the logical and emotional choice. If he were going to travel, he insisted, he wanted his wife along. They’d been off-world for nearly a decade now. The pay down was good there was plenty of good work, and he spent every day with the woman he loved.

  Working together and living together sometimes work out perfectly.

  The shuttle made a less than desirable permanent home, but that didn’t matter to them. It was mobile in the extreme, and that had its obvious advantages. With their pay downs going as fast as they were, they’d have a good retirement in another twenty years, no sweat, and a nice new permanent shelter would be waiting at the end.

  * * *

  It rained that night in a steady downpour. Lightning flashed in close intervals, and the thunder, like a giant soft hammer, rumbled against the shuttle’s stiff hull. The sound of the rain was a distant and gentle hiss.

  Howard woke up at the height of the storm. He turned in his bunk, and noticed that Carla wasn’t in hers. He assumed she was in the toilet and tried for a few more minutes to get back to sleep; but the thunder wouldn’t let him. When he rolled again and saw that she still hadn’t returned, he got up to see where she was.

  He couldn’t imagine that she was outside, but the shuttle was small, and it took him less than a minute to determine that she wasn’t inside.

  He went to the side port and looked out, pressing his nose tight against the thick window.

  Illuminated by the staccato brilliance of the lightning, her head turned up to the sky, her mouth wide open, Carla was standing naked in the rain, with her arms outstretched. Howard thought at first he was dreaming. He was aware of the wild streak in her, but this was unusual even for her.

  There were biological dangers, seen and unseen, on any unexplored planet—especially for the first ones in. It was bad enough during the daylight hours when most of the life forms were visible. The cloak of night shrouded them in greater mystery. It was unthinkable to be outside—naked—on a night like this on a planet as biologically ripe as this one.

  She’s nuts.

  The pouring rain seemed to have kept the insects down at least. It was pitch dark between flashes, and her ghostly image vanished completely in the blackness between them as if it had blinked out of existence entirely.

  “Christ. What’s she doing . . . ? ”

  It was strange. But Carla was strange. Howard watched silently, until, finally, he smiled a painful little smile. If she wanted to commune with the primal spirit of this green planet by standing naked in its pouring rain at night, so be it.

  As he watched her run her hands back over her face and hair, the image transformed from macabre to strangely beautiful. He could almost feel the peppering rain that splashed off her smooth skin, and the cool rivulets running down her belly and legs. The tangled pattern of the foliage made a vivid and baroque background for her pale form.

  She turned in a circle, arms outstretched, and spun with abandon in a brazenly naked pirouette. She was a part of the landscape like some slick, wet creature of the jungle itself, awash in the nourishing rain, celebrating its coming.

  He was tempted to strip naked and join her.

  He smiled.

  She must have sensed him watching her because she looked right at him and waved. She turned around and gyrated her hips at him suggestively.

  “You’re nuts!” he said into the window. “You’re crazy!”

  Beautiful and crazy.

  But as he watched the unearthly image twirl and spin, he couldn’t quite get the hair on the back of his neck to go down completely.

  There was another flash, then a long darkness. The next flash saw her standing stock-still, arms beckoning him, fingers waving, her eyes staring, and the image went from beautiful to bizarre again.

  “Come to me, Howard. Come . . . come,” her lips said.

  “No thanks . . .” he said stiffly and tried to smile at the spooky humor.

  Carla was suddenly jerked out of view like a ragdoll, so violently her body folded backwards as it flew toward the foliage.

  The sound came out of Howard like a grunt, “Hey, goddammit!”

  He watched for a few seconds more, frozen, his heart pounding.

  The silent image of her flying backwards, vanishing into the foliage, burned in his head like an afterimage. One second she was there, a statue of perfect proportions, standing in the driving rain—then nothing.

  He dashed on some clothes, grabbed a light and jammed his hand down on the hatch lock. While the door was swinging down, he took a rifle from the rack and clicked off the safety. He snatched a locator from the rack and put it in his pocket, and then, pushed the switch that turned on the shuttle’s beacon.

  “Carla!” he yelled running down the ramp. “Carla!”

  * * *

  He ran to the spot, shining the floodlight in all directions. He put the light on the spot of jungle that had swallowed her. The bright, white light turned the wall of foliage a pasty green.

  Nothing.

  Water ran in streams off the thick leaves and disappeared into the foliage below. No sign. No blood. Just the pounding rain and the booming thunder.

  “Carla!”

  Something got her. Something big. It’s still in there.

  He stared into the foliage, trying to see something, anything. He turned the rifle’s muzzle toward the jungle at the ready. He wanted to shoot, to kill the jungle itself, but was afraid of further endangering Carla—if she were alive. He crabbed sideways, back and forth, trying to see into the thick tangle of vines and leaves.

  “Carla!”

  He started in.

  The leaves brushed his face and stuck wetly as he worked his way into the tangle. He went in no more than two meters when he saw the blood—a pool of pink in the depression of a broad leaf. The undergrowth was broken and pushed down and forced back as if a bulldozer had moved through. It wouldn’t be hard to follow whatever it was with a track like that.

  “Carla!”

  He picked up his pace, almost at a trot, sweeping the remaining tangle away as he went. The jungle swallowed the light, giving him no more than a few meters visibility ahead and casting moving shadows that confused his eyes, making it difficult to tell phantom branch from real.

  The hole appeared out of nowhere, a giant black mouth angling down into the ground. The suddenness of it bursting out of the green background made him stop cold in his tracks. Three meters in diameter, it gave a fairly good indication of the size of the thing that occupied it. Howard moved closer, letting the light pierce the burrow’s blackness.

  There was Carla’s blood, just a few drops, on the ground at the entrance. He looked closer and found several more a meter or so inside. He could make out strange tracks like clusters of stab holes in the soft soil. He moved in cautiously, holding the light high. The angle was steep and the entrance muddy and slippery. He had to slide part of the way down to a point where the tunnel leveled off.

  The floor was well-packed and worn smooth. He could see more of the tracks in the dirt. Roots protruded from the tunnel walls and ceiling in great numbers like stiff and twisted hair. A narrow and muddy stre
am of water ran in along the cove of the wall. An odor, sweet and thick, permeated the air and left its scent on the back of his tongue and made him want to spit.

  Standing in the burrow’s muffled quiet, he could hear his pulse pounding in his head. His breathing was shallow and rapid. Insects, attracted to the light, buzzed and banged into it. He turned off the hand light, put the strap over his shoulder, and then turned on the rifle’s sight-light. It cast a narrower but adequate beam down the burrow. The compromise would be worth it when it came time to shoot.

  The scent grew stronger as he proceeded, so much so that he had to stop and work up a wad of spit, then with a scowl, silently discharge it onto the burrow’s floor.

  The tunnel bent to the right, and Howard moved tight against the wall. As he inched around the corner, he felt the thin roots drag against his face and neck like stiff, thin fingers.

  Turning the light on the floor, he saw a trail of red drops almost in a straight line. If she were alive, she wasn’t bleeding profusely. He knew the amount of blood on the floor was no indication of her condition. She was most likely hurt very badly.

  He turned another bend, and the light trailed off the brown wall and into space, illuminating a wide spot on a distant wall.

  A chamber.

  He turned the light off, pressed himself against the damp earthen wall and listened.

  The silence and darkness were heavy, and his heart still beat in his ears. He wished he could make the pounding stop so he could better hear. He couldn’t stand the taste in his mouth and leaned out and spat again.

  Then he heard it; a distant but unmistakable sound.

  There are some sounds that cannot be confused with anything else. They are universally recognizable regardless of the source. Masticating and the tearing of meat are some of those sounds.

  He closed his eyes tight against the gruesome noise, trying not to imagine what was happening in that chamber.