He tried to focus on a single input, but then the bulk of them started pressing down on his soul.
“One at a time, Edson, one at a time. That one, right there. I’m only looking at you, so reveal your secrets. I’m ignoring the rest for now, so only you.”
His implant was second nature to him after so many years, and even if it had been a long time since he’d pushed its capabilities to full operation mode, his mind slipped into it like a pair of well-worn shoes. The rest of the feeds remained, as did the sounds of Duke’s and his breathing, the itch on his skin, even the sound of his voice, but his chosen feed seemed to expand and come into focus.
“Shit, it’s more of the plants!” he said, as everything whirled back into the jumble of impressions.
“Bring it back, Edson.” He forced everything into place and brought his chosen feed back to the fore.
When first confronted with the thousands of images, the large building had been all he’d noticed. But now, with his attention on just one feed, while the structure still occupied the foreground of the image he could make out details in the background, a background that resolved into a sea of plant soldiers. The colors were off from what he’d seen on Vasquez, but there was no mistaking the shape and movement. With a mental command, he released the feed, and it retreated to join the rest of the confusing mass.
“I did this,” he said. “I brought them back through the wormhole with me. Somehow, they were in the ship, and now they’re loose.”
An image? Memory? of the boss plant’s head scuttling across the deck on tiny legs came to his mind. He thought it had been a hallucination brought on by hypoxia, like Sergeant Warshowki yelling at him, but what if it had been real? Was the thing somehow alive and now waging war on New Mars?
If so, that made Colby a traitor to humankind. Sure, he’d been railroaded into resigning his commission, but if he’d just abetted an alien invasion, he deserved whatever punishment would be meted out.
“I’ve got to fix this.”
His own fate was the hangman’s noose, but that was irrelevant in the big picture. He was still a Marine, a loyal servant of mankind, and he was going to do anything he could to avert this catastrophe.
He pulled another of the feeds to the fore, this time not having to speak. A mental shrug was his only acknowledgment that this was getting easier. His implant excelled at adapting, filling in gaps to make the system work.
His new point of view was at the wall of the building itself. Leafy green tendrils reached up, attached themselves with a wet click to the walls, and started to pull.
“Click?” he said. “Did I feel that or hear that?”
A crack opened up in the wall, grabbing his attention. Within moments, the crack was a gap, and his host? slipped in. With a start he realized what he should have known all along: the feeds were coming from the plants. He was seeing the world through the horde of plant soldiers. Colby understood what he was experiencing, although he’d only known it on a much smaller scale. When he hitched a ride with a Marine in a battlesuit, it was through the Marine’s sensors and cam feeds. This wasn’t so different. If he concentrated, he could sense everything around the plant soldier, a full three-sixty. No, more than a three-sixty, a complete sphere around it.
He started to get nauseous again and had to pull back. It had been bad enough when faced with a bee eye’s kaleidoscope of thousands of views, but now, he had full environmental awareness from a multitude of sources, and worse still, they all that overlapped one another.
He threw up again, a poor effort that was mostly stomach acid. He spit several times, clearing his mouth. A moment later, he could feel the spit drop back down on his neck from where it had fallen from the locker’s ceiling.
If he was going to do anything, he had to find a way to block some of the sensory input. Even with his implant integrating better, there was just too much for him to process. He just didn’t know how to do that.
“Maybe the security shields?” he asked, his burning throat turning his words into a rasp.
His implant was the pinnacle of current technology, an amazing piece of gear, powered by a tiny long-life battery implanted in his sinuses. As tiny as the current draw was, however, it was possible for a sophisticated enemy to hack his implant, which could obviously have terrible consequences in a battle. That was why implants like his were not only heavily shielded, but he could erect firewalls at will.
He pulled up his collection of firewalls and selected FC-90, which had an hourglass neck that allowed the passage of a limited amount of data. He slapped the firewall over the feeds, then hesitantly opened the flow. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped. The onslaught dropped from overwhelming to barely manageable.
Feeling a little more confident, he found another plant soldier already inside the building and zeroed in on it. Within a split second, he was the soldier. It was his arms that were tearing apart a piece of machinery, ripping pressure rollers right off of their cradle. Another plant pulled one of the heavy cerasteel pieces out of its grasp and started to bend it in two.
His plant reached for a control, and a spark jumped across, zapping it.
“Yow!” Colby yelled. “Wait, how the hell did that happen?”
Colby was not feeling everything the plant touched, but he experienced that shock. At least, he thought he did. His fingers were still tingling, and it sure felt real.
His implant had high-level haptic controls imbedded into it. With enough practice—and Colby had had more than enough over the course of his career—he could control machines with what was essentially a mental touch. It was as if his fingers were on physical controls. He could virtually feel pressure, vibration, temperature, and other sensations without ever actually touching the object.
“Wait a minute. If there is a haptic connection here, then can I control it the same way I can control a drone?”
He jumped back into the feeds and his previous host. It was attacking the base of the control panel. Colby reached out to it, taking his virtual hand and grabbing the thing’s real hand. Nothing happened. The green plant arm passed through his virtual hand as if it was, well, virtual.
“Shit, Edson, concentrate!”
He tried again, this time building up the hand, adding bones, tendons, and ligaments. The plant soldier’s arm might have hesitated a moment, but it wasn’t stopped, and it tore another piece of the machinery apart.
“What am I doing wrong?” he asked.
He tried several more tacks, even running through his Troubleshooting checklist, but nothing was working. The machine, whatever it was, was soon turned into scrap, and the plant soldier moved to the next one.
Colby switched to another plant soldier but didn't have any more success. He knew he was making tiny adjustments in their actions, but not enough to stop any of them from destroying the factory.
Where’re the facility’s security forces? Are they going to just ignore this?
The factories were the lifeblood of New Mars, and to much of the Republic. Most were automated, but still, there were Marines and local security forces on the planet for a reason. They should be reacting to the assault.
Colby paused from his efforts and widened the awareness of his host so he could simply take in the scene, hoping to see signs of the cavalry riding in to save the day. All he saw was destruction. The entire wall of the factory was gone, and a good half of the machinery destroyed. All of the plants were working with a single purpose.
Well, all except one. A single solder was whirling around aimlessly, knocking into the others. It stopped and stood still for a moment, then lashed out erratically with a ropy arm. . . at the same time that Duke jerked at his side.
What?
His fingers were not restrained, and he could feel Duke’s warm body. He pushed out into her, and she jerked within her restraints. At the same time, the crazy plant soldier jerked.
“Duke, Duke, who’s a good girl?”
The plant soldier stopped, then wiggled.
He pushed harder into her with his fingers, producing a yelp. Immediately, the plant solder stopped wiggling and marched to join the rest at the nearest machine.
He couldn’t believe what he’d seen. His eyes told him that the soldier and Duke had somehow been attached, but his mind screamed that was ridiculous. And it was ridiculous. A dog couldn’t control an enemy soldier, could she?
Unless this really was a dream brought about in his last seconds of life in a hypoxia-induced death, it sure looked like the two had been connected. It made a perverse degree of sense. Somehow, he was connected to the plant soldiers as they rampaged. Why not Duke? They were both inside a womb of sorts in the locker. Colby had the sneaking suspicion that the ship’s tendrils had not only kept them alive, but somehow plugged them to the plant ecosystem. They’d been connected to the command and control.
And it hit him. Duke had stopped the plant soldier in its tracks. Colby had been trying to stop an arm by simply holding it back. He should have been doing as Duke did and become the host, for lack of a better term.
He turned back inwards to his host. Instead of trying to control its movements, he pictured himself sinking into it, being subsumed by it. Nothing happened, but he wasn’t going to give up. If a dog could do it, so could a human. He closed off every possible input he could, seeing himself sink into the quicksand of the soldier. This was too reminiscent of his nightmares, so he changed that to sinking into a warm bath. He could feel the plant’s very being, but he could not find a way in. He adjusted, shifted, changed the force of his projections, and suddenly, something opened up, and he started to fall in. . . and immediately clawed for freedom.
He’d felt himself being controlled, instead of him doing the controlling. The plant mind was not like anything he’d experienced nor imagined. It was so. . . alien. It wasn’t what he’d imagined a science fiction hive mind to be, but it sure wasn’t human, and that scared him to the quick. He’d almost been taken over by it.
Marines don’t quit, however, and Colby knew he had to do something. But what? He’d pictured himself sinking into the plant. What if he reversed that image? What if the plant sunk into him? Or if he surrounded it?
He formed a new image, one of his body flowing around the plant, taking it in like an amoeba eating a bacterium. He’d already formed a type of resonance with this plant soldier, and far quicker than he’d expected, he’d drawn the plant in. Colby was still Colby, and he thought he was in control of the plant. The soldier was attacking another machine, and Colby reached out with his mind with a command to stop. The soldier hesitated, but after a moment commenced again.
Frustrated, Colby sent out a powerful order, a mental scream. The soldier stopped dead, ropy limbs still grasping the machine. Another plant pulled the machine parts from his soldier, and still, it remained motionless.
Carefully, Colby withdrew, waiting for the plant to start in on the attack again. It remained motionless. If he could, he’d have raised a fist into the air in triumph.
There had to be more than a thousand of the plant soldiers inside the ruins of the factory, and Colby sensed that there were far more destroying other factories. It was too much for him to grasp the magnitude of what he was trying to do, so he refused to think about it. Every journey began with a single step.
He shifted to another host to begin the process again.
***************
“Stop that plant,” Colby sent, then waited to see what would happen.
After an hour, he’d only stopped thirty plants from their rampage of destruction. It became clear that he was fighting a losing battle, and his finger in the dyke wasn’t going to hold back the ocean. He had to change tactics, and this was his attempt to do more.
His implant was continually improving the interface with each interaction, and with a specific command, he was hoping he could get soldier to fight soldier. If he was successful, that would make his impact that much greater. Instead of a single plant standing still, he would take out two: one being held, and the other doing the holding.
In the back of his mind, he kept wondering about the boss plant. Topeka had taken off the thing’s head, but he now believed what he’d seen with the head scuttling across the ship’s bridge. Something had started the plant army on their rampage here on New Mars. Was its objective the same as back on Vasquez? Was it orchestrating this attack? And if it was out there controlling the assault, why hadn’t it ordered any of the stopped soldiers back into battle? All good questions, but Colby lacked sufficient intel for more than guesswork, besides which his immediate focus was consumed by taking over the plant soldiers.
Ordering one soldier to attack another was different that simply stopping it. His target plant reached over and wrapped up the soldier next to it. That one kept reaching for the last pieces of the machine it had been dismantling, but Colby’s plant was like an octopus. They both teetered for a moment before falling over. They lay intertwined on the grounds, ropy plant arms twisted in each other’s grip.
“Two for one,” Colby said.
Duke answered with a piteous yelp. He knew she had to be confused and scared, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Unless I can get one of the soldiers to come back and open the locker and free us?
He’d tried several times to free a foot and start hunting for the hatch release, but he hadn’t come close. He knew he was in the locker for the long haul unless he could figure out a way to be rescued.
But if I get out of here, can I still control them?
Whatever was holding them was probably what allowed him and Duke to interface with the plant soldiers. It boggled the mind that two different forms of life could connect like that, but the universe was filled with amazing things, and the proof was right there in front of him.
For the moment, he and Duke were safe, and he could control the plant soldiers, so it was probably better to stand pat and create more havoc. He checked on his quisling, which had managed to tear off one of its opponent’s arms, but was now in danger of losing one of its own. He was hoping it could make short shrift of the other, but as the two combatants slowly maneuvered for the upper hand, he realized that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, if at all. He gave it another command to attack, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to reinforce his last command, then withdrew, looking for his next target.
He was able to take over this one in less than a minute, and it unhesitantly turned from a half-destroyed fabricator of some sort to fall upon the soldier next to it. It took another minute for the victim to seem to realize what was happening and turn to face its ally-turned-enemy. None of the other soldiers seemed to notice the pair and they wrapped each other up in mortal combat.
As his implant fine-tuned the process, the time to take over a soldier became less and less. By his tenth “grab,” as he began to think of it, the process took about thirty seconds. The fabricator that had been this group of soldiers’ target was out-of-action, but no more damage was being done.
Colby felt a thrill of victory before he widened his perceptions. This factory had to still have a couple of hundred as of yet undamaged machines, and there were hundreds of plant soldiers still bent on destroying every last one of them.
“No time to admire your handiwork, Edson. Get your ass back to work.”
***************
Just over thirty minutes later, Colby had set another fifty-six soldiers against their brethren, so 111 were out of the demolition sweepstakes. It was only 111 because one of the ones Colby’d attacked had managed to tear off all the arms of the one he had taken over. It limped back to join the others while its attacker tried to inchworm-hump after it. Colby paused to watch the victor for a moment, he needed the break. His head ached with the onset of a killer migraine, just like the ones he sometimes had when first learning to use his implant.
The tips of his fingers rested on what was probably Duke’s haunch, and the contact was an a
nchor. He was sure she appreciated his touch as well. He wasn’t connecting with her like he was with the plant soldiers he'd commandeered. But there was some sort of connection going on, just the tiniest bit of backsurge in the tendrils that held them both fast.
He breathed deep, and took control of the limping soldier, ready to send it to attack one of the others, but with only half of a single arm left, he realized that the thing couldn’t do much damage. He was about to shift to another soldier when a blinding light filled his head, a flash of intense pain flooding him for an instant before it was gone.
What the . . .
The jolt had been a flash, almost too short to feel, but his nerves trembled as if remembering pain. His headache intensified, and he struggled trying to bring his hands up to his temples.
He forced himself to concentrate, trying to select another frame to figure out what had happened. It was easier to slip into his previous captive, and from it, he could see the limping soldier, or rather, what was left of it. Bits and pieces were strewn haphazardly around the floor and walls, a green mist hovering in the still air where his host had stood.
A streak of red light flashed past his/the plant soldier’s field of view, and one of the soldiers tearing into another piece of machinery exploded into a thousand bits of plant. More green mist bloomed over the spot.
Colby knew that flash for laser light. Specifically, the laser from a M88 rifle, and that could mean only one thing—the Marines had finally arrived!
Several more lasers reached out, exploding the soldiers. The lasers weren't doing the damage—they were merely the spotting tool, like an old-fashioned tracer round. The M88 was a microwave rifle, sending out two megajoules joules at 20 GHz in .25-second pulses.
It was a perfect weapon for rapidly heating water—and objects which contained water tended to come apart with extreme prejudice. Plant soldiers evidently contained a lot of water.
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