The Genetic Imperative

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  The desperate cell flopped on the ground. With its two remaining limbs, it pushed its body forward, trying to crush them. The warriors surrounded it, swinging up, down and from every angle until the creature was a leaking mass of shattered, rock chunks.

  There was Something wrong with this situation. Once the first trigger cell goes active, the others usually followed by instinct. Trigger cells like this usually operated in groups and they were much smaller. They should be seeing hundreds by now. They also should have seen more evidence of the trigger cell.

  It was as if this one lay in wait, concealing itself. She believed this patrol was relatively safe because they'd seen zero evidence of any spore activity. Silicoids were nothing if not predictable. All the signs here were vastly different than her experience showed. Nina was grateful because this small group wouldn't stand much of a chance against more than three or four creatures of the size they dispatched. They should not see a cell like this alone, though. Trigger spore usually couldn't function this far from the main body or another group. Nina thought all this as the group reformed into a defensive configuration. They lost two in the skirmish.

  Comm traffic indicated a substantial number of warriors received their call and were on their way to intercept and reinforce. The newly organized main force was forming up behind them. She hoped they didn't spread themselves too thin.

  "Fall back to the main force. Stay alert," Nina ordered.

  The Comm Sergeant reported that reinforcements were just a few hundred meters away.

  Startled voices came across her channel. There was active contact between the reinforcements and Nina's retreating troop. A few soldiers behind her took it upon themselves to meet the threat. They charged forward, passing Nina. The rest of the group followed, energized by their previous fight and eager for more. They saw another trigger cell, slightly smaller than the first, just up ahead. The spore vanished. Nina had never seen spore behave this way. Either they all triggered by instinct, or not at all. These seemed to be toying with them, probing.

  The land was rougher around a large acid pool surrounded by small rock outcroppings where the cell disappeared. Smaller pits surrounded the pool, not quite craters, that were also filled with acid. Strange, Nina thought. The holes didn't resemble the rest of the craters on the planet. Their shapes were irregular and their edges jagged.

  Nina's troop merged into the reinforcements. Comm reported the new group numbered two hundred fifteen. They clustered around the pool. A few warriors scrambled up a flat boulder to crouch and look down to examine the acid pit. They all held staves ready, faces alert. With their circle complete around the glassy acid pool, a few soldiers faced the other way, pressing their backs into another soldier to serve as a rear guard.

  Reports were coming in from the front. Lines were adjusting around the point of contact. More fighters were heading their way.

  "Comm," Nina thought. She was out of breath. She held her staff at her solar plexus in the two-hand-center position, knuckles up.

  "It's quiet, captain. Best count: five trigger cells inside this pool."

  On the open channel, Nina replied, "Careful and steady. Hold position."

  The surface of the acid pond was pressed flat and glasslike by the weight of the air. Nothing moved but the warriors who shifted uneasily on their feet, watching. A soldier across the circle from Nina twitched. She felt something. Nina made eye contact, and the soldier spoke on an exclusive channel.

  "Vibration," the soldier said, and turned her face to the ground in concentration.

  A thin filament whipped out in a blur from the pool. It had covered the meter distance between the soldier and the pool before anyone had a chance to swing a staff. Before Nina had an opportunity to issue a warning, the soldier was on her back and sliding into the hole. The filament belonged to a mirror-spore.

  The surface of the pond exploded into violent, silvery foam. A column of filament rose up from the center of the acid pond like a living rope. Tendrils flashed out and wrapped around arms, necks, legs and feet. Some tendrils pierced eyes and spiked straight through battle robes like skewers through raw meat. Soldiers screamed in pain and fright and rage. Soldiers rose above the spore and were dragged into it.

  Nina leaped high as a mass of tendrils flashed out at her ankles. They split into two sections as they approached. As she rose up into the air covering twice her height, she swung her staff with her right hand, smashing aside another massed wave of tendrils that flashed at her. The thing tried to capture her weapon, but the energy focused through it shattered the slender arms.

  Nina arched her back at the peak of her jump, bringing her feet over her head and around. The move brought her a safe distance away from the creature when she landed. No sooner than feet hit the ground, did Nina spring forward again. She switched hands with her staff and swung it again like a sword to destroy a retracting mass of tendrils that captured the soldier beside her. She grabbed the soldier's arm, and her compatriot wielded her staff to break the remaining deadly cords.

  Both soldiers turned to another who abandoned her weapon to claw desperately at the ground as the mirror spore tried to drag her under. The tendrils penetrated her energy sheath at her calves and Nina could see them working under the skin. Nina and another smashed the tendrils with several strikes, and another captive was free. This one had little chance. The microscopic shadow cells would already be in her bloodstream, infecting her and petrifying her flesh. They dragged her to safety by the robe collar.

  "Get her to the rear! Find a medic! Hurry!" Nina ordered.

  The soldier obeyed without hesitation, bundling the wounded soldier over her shoulder like a sack of vegetables. She disappeared into the mist and Nina hoped she reached the reinforcements in time.

  The new troop was already extracting itself from contact with the mirror spore. The beast had done its damage and sank back down into the pool as the Warriors reached a safe distance. A spore this large couldn't operate out of its liquid environment. They marked the spot on the battle map and called for the heavies to come in to wipe it out with ground weapons.

  They regrouped. Comm reported thirty soldiers lost. The lost soldiers would already be petrifying or digested by the spore. A new attack might come at any time. The group formed a protective semicircle facing the pit as Nina called for a report.

  "Another thousand soldiers inbound. Standard line formation. Heavy troop right behind. We are the forward contact, and we have reports of more activity closer to the canyon," the officer said, and copied her report back to Command.

  "Get the wounded to the lava dome. I want force discipline. Nobody moves until I give the order. Defense only. Do not pursue," Nina repeated her order to the newly forming line.

  The troop formed a column and ran back to meet the approaching line. Cells popped up along the way and were easily destroyed. The attacks grew more frequent but still seemed just as random. Creatures would pop up here and there from cracks and fissures in the ground. Their ranks were spreading out to meet sporadic attacks that now came from the flanks as well. Nina herself struck at several cells that shot up at her feet. They were small, no bigger than both her feet put together. As suddenly as they struck, the spore stopped. They no longer had a solid column, but a series of posts around which the attacks seemed to flow. This was not what Nina ordered.

  That's when it happened. Nina guessed that there must have been thousands. They rose up from every crater, crack, and pit. Soldiers all around her were overcome. Dozens of cells latched onto them, draining their armor before they could react. To Nina's horror, a spore ripped the breather from a soldier's mouth and sent its tentacles down her throat. Her chest split open, energy sheath still intact. Tentacles whipped out from her chest to lash at the surrounding soldiers.

  The warrior's arms did not belong to her anymore and became another Silicoid weapon. The soldier turned to Nina, the body of the spore sitting atop her head like a grotesque joke of a hat. Her staff swung at Nina, who brought he
r weapon up to cancel the blow that would have split her head. Nina countered with a two-handed lever strike to the spore. Both spore and skull shattered, but not before Nina had time to realize that the soldier was still conscious. Nina saw the pain, terror, and confusion in her eyes just before Nina finished her.

  Nina grabbed the warrior's staff as it fell from her useless body. A scream came from far away. It carried far even through the chaotic soup that was the air of that planet. It contained all the rage and pain and fear Nina had ever known. It was mostly rage. The sound seemed to urge the warriors around her forward. The scream went on as Nina became a blur with a staff in each hand, smashing, striking, destroying. She did not pause when she realized the screaming was coming from her mouth. The force of it caused breathing fluid to leak from the edges of her mask and even escape her energy sheath. The sparkling lights before brightening vision did not slow her but somehow made her move faster.

  Nina screamed again. Two lines formed and squeezed out the attacking spore between them. Arms flailed against the onslaught. The original force was halved. The attacks were still fierce, but soldiers held their ground and stopped falling. One line faced rearward, the other uphill.

  The trigger cells and mirror spore surrounded them but backed away. They were thick as grass. The spore could have finished them off, but did not. The lines of soldiers separated and began to form a defensive circle. Comm traffic reported the main force was inbound, just a few meters away. A shifting shadow emerged from the mist. It was their reinforcement. In that threatened circle, a picture began to emerge as Nina had the chance to think again. A new horror dawned on her. The realization came too late. Bait. They were corralled as bait. That is why the swarm didn't finish them.

  "Stop!" Nina thought-screamed to the approaching line. "Halt! Hold!" Her orders were lost in the charge.

  It was too late. The new line absorbed the defending group and charged forward to make contact with the swarm. The light trigger cells and immature mirror spore splashed against the wall of soldiers like light surf against a seawall. The soldiers charged to the edge of the canyon, encouraged by their victory.

  The weak sunlight disappeared, blotted out by a towering wave of sulfuric acid that broke over the lip of the canyon and arced up far into the sky. Nina could see dark shapes moving around inside the wave. As the wave broke over them, fully mature and full-sized Silicoids were everywhere.

  Chapter 4: Earth, New Mexico, Incursion

  The Unit gave all non-humans regular human names. It was a coping strategy and a tradition from the very early days of the Program. The first Exo they named was Ray the Gray, from the Kapteyn solar system, about thirteen light years from Earth. His appearance was representative of the Grays, a moniker of course given them for their tone of skin slightly darker than that of the African elephant. Ray's height was about the same as an average American seven-year-old boy.

  The Grays were surprisingly heavy. Their bones and tissues were very dense. Although their limbs were very smooth and slender, Grays exhibited shocking physical strength, at least, equal to an average Olympic powerlifter. They hurried for nobody. They took their time in all things and moved like praying mantises—uncannily smooth and slow. Grays were the stuff of Hollywood movies, tabloid magazines and conspiracy theories. These ideas and images of the Grays in the popular culture were carefully crafted by parts of the Unit over the decades to manage the problem of exposure that the Grays presented. The Grays just kept showing up for a while until they were brought into agreement.

  Major Spivey explained to Chase long ago that the physical attributes of Grays were due to the nature of gravity on their planet, the shape of their muscle fibers, and the way their muscles connected to bone. Chase found that mildly interesting on background but he didn’t care about all that. His field was not exobiology or comparative exo-evolution. His job had always been the assessment of alien disposition. His oath demanded that he defend against "all enemies, foreign and domestic," and he took that oath seriously beyond measure and now apparently, beyond the planet. There were odd times when Chase wondered about that, but he had a job to do, so he did it. Chase still often called the extraterrestrials ‘"Aliens" and not "Exos." He was traditional that way.

  The most shocking feature about the Grays were the eyes. While the cat eyes were hard to get used to, they were also Ray's most striking and endearing feature. Popular descriptions of the huge, black, angled eyes were accurate, but not many understood that the Grays had secondary eyelids. One had to meet a Gray up close to understand that. Those descriptions in the fringe media and movies were not designed by the Program to foster understanding. The icon of the black-eyed monster was carefully constructed for hiding the truth in plain sight.

  Given illumination just above candlelight intensity, the hard, shell-like lids dropped down into pockets behind the cheeks to rest on a membrane just above the cheekbones. The eyes were very sensitive to light; again due to the peculiarities of evolution on their planet and the current nature of their engineered environments.

  Ray’s irises were a hypnotic blend of green and almost-golden hazel with streaks of blue, violet and orange that flowed like slow-motion lightning. The colors moved and shifted like a small nebula in a snow globe surrounding a long, impossibly black, vertical oval of a pupil. Even Chase found it beautiful. Chase didn’t think Ray ever really understood the reaction his eyes got from humans. He gracefully accepted the gushing compliments that even people who knew him well and had met him many times, could not help but offer.

  It wasn’t that his race didn’t understand beauty, nor was it that they couldn’t understand pain or emotion. It was only that their frames of reference for such things were radically different. The gaps between Human and Gray conception of these things could be measured in a baker’s dozen light years and on an evolutionary scale measured in tens of thousands of years. That was why, more than forty years ago, Chase found it necessary to help find the right terms to explain to the Grays how they should not, could not, will not and shall not be allowed to harvest and dissect human beings or Advocates at will. They had been doing it too long, and it was time for them to stop. Humans and Advocates were not lab animals. Having the Grays understand that was their first order of business.

  Things were touch-and-go at first. The first meeting between Grays and humans held on equal terms did not go very well. In fact, their first actual meeting on terms of equal force was something of a diplomatic incident. Apparently, the first Gray delegation had trouble translating the phrases "blow the fuck out of you" and "bullets through your fucking shit-filled egg-heads" and especially; "heartless, soulless, robotic, shit-eating pigfuckers."

  The Grays did, however, understand the anger behind those phrases. Chase was just a captain then, but he held the third-highest rank in their very small, not-yet International Unit, and was therefore an equal leader in the first Human delegation to an extraterrestrial race. He used his office to communicate the human position in a way that got results. At that moment, it was a message which nobody else in the room seemed able to deliver. The world will never know that the entire course of human history at one point hinged on a single, very angry, very foul-mouthed, and very articulate United States Marine.

  Chase remembered Rachel biting back hysterical laughter as she attempted a poker face. She had never tired of reminding him of the story in certain isolated moments over the years. She found profanity to be a uniquely human form expression, and she forever reveled in Chase’s inspired and florid use of it. Her poker face was for the rest of the human delegation.

  The Grays were nearly telepathic. What they could not understand from humans regarding idiom, simile, and metaphor, they did understand through perceived energies produced by thought and indicative of certain animal instincts—instincts such as survival.

  Much of the communication between members of their race happened through the reception of brain waves. It was easier for them to receive the brain waves of other grays, but
they also picked up a bit from Humans and Advocates. The human equivalent of this perception would be inflection, facial expression, body language and tones of voice. Very articulate and intelligent Grays could communicate with each other entirely non-verbally, but were savants and were exceedingly rare. Grays of this caliber were often found in high positions of scholarship. Ray was one of these savants. He was the Gray’s response to that first meeting. They Grays offered to humanity one of their finest. Ray was a gift to humanity from an advanced humanoid race, and Chase became proud to call him a friend.

  Chase learned a lot about Ray’s people through many hours spent sitting, drinking coffee or camping with Ray far out in the wilderness. Everyone was amused by the fact that Ray loved coffee. He was offered, and he accepted coffee everywhere he went. Of course, wherever he went, he did so cloaked in the most extreme secrecy of covert flights and heavily concealed transport. Travel with Ray was a major, sometimes international logistics operation involving thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. The group made sure he got around. Ray was an ambassador. When they could, Ray and Chase would camp together high in the Rocky Mountains or far north in places like Manitoba and always far away from civilization.

  Ray loved the forest. Earth was a place he could experience trees. His planet was industrialized long before humans learned to count. As his people evolved, they didn’t so much conquer nature as let the natural processes of their world wind down. Their intellectual evolution outlasted the natural environment of their home planet. By the time they were able to leave their home for the stars, their planet’s magnetic field had collapsed, destroying all natural habitat. The Gray's world was burned to a cinder by an indifferent star. Even they didn’t have the technology to prevent that.