Dust World

by B. V. Larson

  “What I don’t get is why this entire hole in the ground never filled up with sand,” I said to Anne.

  “I’m not sure about that myself,” she said, staring at the soaring cliffs. “I guess the cauldron must erupt occasionally.”

  I looked at her in alarm. “Erupt?”

  “Yes, of course. You do realize that we’re inside the throat of a volcano, don’t you? Every once in a while it hiccups and then fills back up with water from underground aquifers.”

  “Hiccups? As in it blasts lava into the sky?”

  “Right.”

  I thought about that and found I didn’t like the implications. She was saying we were inside a dormant volcano. That explained the sinkhole-like lake. And I understood that the water on this world was underground for the most part. But knowing that I might be consumed in a gush of fire at any second didn’t do anything for my nerves.

  A few minutes later I got the surprise of my day. I spotted someone—someone who wasn’t part of our squad.

  There was no doubt she was human. She was mostly naked, too. She had scraps of leathery cloth wrapped around the most important parts, but that was it. She was young, I could tell that. Full grown, but probably a little younger than I was.

  I didn’t shout, because I was stunned. I saw her crouching on a rock near the wall of the canyon, watching us. There was something in her hands, something which she lifted and directed toward me. There was a snapping sound.

  For a brief second, I thought she’d thrown a stick at me. Then the crossbow bolt struck my armor and the point rasped and clattered, bouncing off my breastplate. If I’d been a light-trooper, I might have been killed.

  I shouted an alarm and signaled the rest of the squad, but when I turned back toward the girl to point her out, she’d vanished.

  -13-

  At first, I don’t think anyone believed me. But they examined the projectile the girl had fired at me, and they had to admit that none of us had brought a weapon like that from Earth.

  “This is a big deal,” Adjunct Leeson kept saying, over and over again.

  He ordered us to close our faceplates and circle up, with our eyes turned toward the jungle-like plant growth. We did so while he stood in the middle and reported the sighting to the Centurion and then to the Primus herself.

  “They want to talk to you,” Leeson said. “I’m patching you in. Don’t screw me by saying anything stupid, McGill.”

  “Uh…no, sir.”

  A moment later I was on the line with Primus Turov. She sounded agitated.

  “What kind of stunt is this, McGill?” she demanded. “How can you possibly have found the colonists and then lost them again?”

  “The colonists?” I asked, taken by surprise. But as I thought about it, I realized she was probably right. The girl must have been a member of the lost colonists we’d come to rescue or to exterminate, as the case may be. I’d been expecting astronauts of some kind not primitives.

  “The colonists attacked you, I’m certain of it. That officially classifies them as hostile.”

  “It all might have been a misunderstanding, Primus,” I said. “I don’t think—”

  “You aren’t paid to think, McGill,” she interrupted. “No reported sightings have come in from other canyons. None of the other cohorts have made contact. I need your team to communicate with them more meaningfully.”

  “Well, I can confirm that they aren’t much of a threat,” I said. “They can’t fight worth a damn against our equipment using crossbows.”

  “You aren’t qualified to determine what constitutes a threat,” she snapped. “The colonists are a huge problem, but it seems they aren’t a widespread one at least. I’m giving your squad new orders, effective immediately. You’re to find their base camp and befriend these colonists. Do you read me, Leeson?”

  “Yes, sir!” Leeson said quickly. He was patched into the conversation but had been keeping quiet. “We’ll find them.”

  “See that you do. Turov out.”

  I was kicked out of the chat line then without so much as an over-and-out. I described the conversation to Anne.

  “They’ve clearly regressed over the years,” she said of the colonists. “What I wouldn’t give to do a full write-up on them. Possibly the regression started while their ship was still in flight to this system.”

  “I don’t care about studying them,” I said. “They’re human, they’re in trouble, and they’re just as trapped here as we are. We need to offer them our protection, not march around scaring them to death in metal suits.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go near that girl bare-chested,” Anne told me. “She’ll put an arrow through your sternum without hesitating.”

  “They’re probably just scared,” I argued.

  “Look,” Anne said, her face worried. “I know how you must feel. That girl looked young and harmless—but she’s probably more like a wild animal than an Earth-girl by now.”

  “What are you talking about? Why is everyone so down on our own colonists?”

  “First of all, they could get our species erased. If they screw up, we might get blamed for it. The Galactics don’t care about the details. Humanity is like a school of fish to them. We’re all the same. They’ll remove us if we irritate them.”

  I’d heard this kind of talk before, and I’d become pretty irritated with the Galactics myself over the years. But I knew enough about legion politics not to say things that were against established policy.

  “I get that part,” I said. “But we aren’t even trying to treat them like lost friends or like people who need our help. What about your oath to heal? Doesn’t that extend to them as well?”

  Anne looked troubled by that. “I suppose it does.”

  “And I don’t know why everyone thinks they’re animals. Maybe we just like thinking that so we’ll feel less guilty about pushing them around.”

  “It’s more than that,” she said. “I’ve read up on the history of the colony mission to Zeta Herculis as we flew out here. The people aboard the ship itself were separatists—folks their own governments didn’t want around. They didn’t like the new way of things. They resisted worldwide government, and many of them were ‘volunteered’ to colonize the stars for precisely that reason.”

  I hadn’t known about that, but it made sense. Even before the Galactics had shown up and annexed Earth, we’d been crunching down into blocks of nations. Currencies had merged, as had political entities. Many nations were only partly in control of their own destinies. My grandparents had protested the changes and been put on government shit-lists for years afterward.

  “I studied the likely social progress of the Hydra mission in school,” Anne told me. “It was part of every psychologist’s dream to interview these people again, but it was assumed the mission was lost. Just think about it, James! They took off in 2041, just eleven years before the Galactics arrived and delivered their ultimatum to Earth. That’s more than eighty years ago!”

  “Yeah, so you’re saying that none of the original colonists are alive, right?”

  “Right, only adults flew. Even accounting for relativistic effects, I doubt there’s a single colonist who can recall standing on their homeworld.”

  I thought about that, and I could see what she was getting at. These people wouldn’t be like us. They couldn’t be. Cut off and flying in normal space without a warp drive system, they’d traveled at sub-light speeds all the way out here. The long journey and the many subsequent decades they’d spent on this dusty rock would change them drastically.

  “But they’re still human,” I insisted.

  “Genetically yes, but not culturally. They might be barbarians now. After today’s encounter, that looks very likely. Humans, but feral humans. Wild humans. People like nothing we’ve ever had to deal with before. The last truly wild humans on Earth died out a century ago.”

  We’d reached the jumbled pile of rocks that had formed at the base of the cliffs. Dusty and hot, I didn’t find i
t a pleasant spot in which to be. We looked around, and it wasn’t until our point-man, Gorman, fell into a hole and vanished that we figured out what we were looking for.

  “They’re underground!” I shouted. “Look for caves, tunnels.”

  When we found Gorman, he wasn’t moving. We dragged him back into the sunlight and opened his visor. His eyes were closed and there was blood trickling from his mouth.

  “Retreat off these rocks!” roared Veteran Harris.

  He dragged Gorman with help from two other troopers. Our armored gauntlets whined and protested, giving us the strength to carry the man. Heavy troopers typically weighed in at over five hundred kilos in their full kit.

  Specialist Anne Grant was there the moment we had him off the rocks.

  “It was some kind of trap,” Carlos said. “That has to be what it was. He just fell in and disappeared. The ground ate him and killed him. But there wasn’t an explosion—couldn’t have been a mine. Weirdest damn thing I ever saw.”

  “Shut up, give him some air!” shouted Harris.

  Gorman’s face didn’t even twitch as Anne opened up his breastplate and looked him over.

  “There’s a wound here, at the base of the neck. My tapper shows his suit was breached.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “At the joints. Something chewed its way in. Look.”

  We all did, and we didn’t like what we saw. A small hole was right there in the black polymer cusps that formed the joints in the armor. Our suits weren’t made entirely of metal. They had smart-cloth components inside and hard polymer interlocking tubes at the joints.

  “Something cut its way in,” Harris said, fingering a hole in the black tubing.

  “Yeah,” Carlos agreed. “Then it ate its way into Gorman. Could it be some kind of acid?”

  “No vapor,” Anne said. “No chemical traces, either. I’m not a tech, but I’d say it was a nanite swarm of some kind.”

  We frowned at one another. Leeson walked up and put his hands on his hips.

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, sir. Not quite,” Anne replied. “I might be able to save him, but there’s something burrowing into his skull right now. I’ve got it on my internal vibra-scope.”

  She showed the officer her instruments. I winced just thinking about it. The man had a worm in him—a metal worm of smart microscopic robots.

  Leeson shook his head. “We’re not screwing around with that!” he said. “I’m declaring this man dead. Call it in, Grant.”

  “But sir, he’s still—”

  Leeson pulled out his sidearm and discharged it into Gorman’s face. He kept the trigger down, causing wisps of steam and smoke to rise up. He made sure that the probe digging into Gorman’s suit was destroyed.

  Anne looked pissed off. I didn’t blame her. It was always hard to watch our officers kill one of our own. I imagined that for a bio dedicated to healing it was doubly difficult to take.

  “That was unnecessary and counterproductive, sir!” she said.

  “Yeah, well,” Leeson said, “write up all your complaints and put them in your report. I’m not taking any chances out here. We’ve encountered resistance with sophisticated weaponry. I’m going to call this incident in, and then I’m going to blow this entire region of rocks to dust. From space it will look like a new sandstorm before we’re done.”

  Carlos gave a little happy whoop. A few others echoed it. No one wanted to chase these colonists into the rocks and be eaten by some kind of nano-worm.

  Anne was examining something else now. I looked it over, and I realized it was the arrow that had struck my chest. She eyed the point critically.

  “This is made of the same material,” she said. “Nanites, programmed to eat their way through any flexible soft points in armor—or flesh. You’re lucky it hit your breastplate so squarely, James. It appears the arrowhead didn’t activate.”

  “So these primitive colonists aren’t so primitive,” I said.

  “Definitely not.”

  I thought about the encounter and wondered if the girl had really been trying to kill me. Maybe she’d been trying to warn me off. It was hard to say what her intentions were. But either way, I didn’t feel good about the idea of blowing up these people without giving them a chance to explain themselves.

  “Excuse me, Adjunct,” I heard myself say.

  “What is it, McGill?”

  “I’m sorry sir, but I must point out that the Primus ordered us to make contact with these colonists: To befriend them.”

  Leeson laughed. He pointed down at the mess that had once been Gorman. Already our troops were stripping armor off the corpse. Heavy armor was valuable, and Gorman would need his suit again after he was revived back at the lifter.

  “Does this look like they’re in a friendly mood, Specialist?” Leeson asked.

  “No, sir,” I admitted. “But we’re clanking around their home territory in suits of armor carrying military weapons. Historically speaking, that’s not the usual way you make peaceful contact with a native population.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “I hereby volunteer to approach their tunnels. I’ll strip off my armor and my weapons. If they kill me—well, I guess you can revive me back at the lifter.”

  “Don’t let him do it, Adjunct!” Harris said, coming up to us. His eyes were big and bloodshot. I wondered if last night’s dinner was starting to get to him after all.

  Leeson glanced at Harris, then looked back at me with narrowed eyes. “Are you some kind of kiss-up?” he demanded. “Or are you just insane?”

  “He’s a little of both,” Harris said.

  “Neither, sir,” I said. “I’m simply following the Primus’ orders. I suggest you do the same, sir.”

  Leeson grumbled but waved me on. He pulled the rest of the squad back to the lakeshore where they could watch the show in safety.

  “Could you move out of sight, sir?” I asked him. “I think it would be better if you were hidden in the brush.”

  “Is this some kind of a crazy dodge?” Leeson shouted back. “Are you planning to go AWOL on this rock? If you are you won’t last a day, McGill.”

  “Nothing like that, sir.”

  After a bit more grumbling, the squad withdrew. They left me to face the hot rocks alone. I pulled off my armor piece by piece while I eyed the quiet rocks.

  I had some second thoughts at that point. I found myself standing in a smart-cloth jumper in front of what had to be a nest of hostile people. All I had in my hands was a strip of white cloth I planned on holding up as a makeshift flag of truce. So far, these colonists had shot me and sprung a sophisticated booby trap. They were bound to have more tricks up their sleeves—if they had sleeves. I wondered what they were afraid of and why hadn’t yet attempted peaceful contact. After all, we were as human as they were. We were the same species. Surely they could see that.

  I hadn’t moved a millimeter in over thirty seconds. My thoughts were interrupted by Leeson, who shouted at me from the plant growth to my left.

  “Damn it, McGill! Get on with it!”

  I sighed and began to climb those stark boulders. I felt the heat radiating from them and burning my hands right through my gloves. It was times like these that made me wonder if there was something wrong with my brain.

  I picked my way over the hot rocks, staying on the large flat surfaces as much as I could. I avoided open areas of ground and loose gravel, assuming that’s where the traps were. I climbed until I was within fifty meters of the cliff itself.

  Suddenly, I made contact. It happened fast, and it happened with smooth coordination. Six of the colonists—or hunters, or whatever you want to call them—sprang up from hiding places all around me. I wasn’t armed, so I slowly put up my hands and stood there.

  “Do you guys speak English?” I asked hopefully.

  They didn’t say anything. Up until this point they’d barely made a sound. They’d come out of dark cracks under the biggest boulders, sliding out
from under their rocks like scorpions coming out of burrows.

  None of them spoke or smiled. Instead they were crouching and staring. Their crossbows were loaded with dark metal bolts, and I had no doubt that a hit from any of those weapons would chew through my flesh. I’d be dead in less than a minute from a minor wound.

  I kept my hands raised, and I glanced over my shoulder toward the lakeshore. I wasn’t really surprised to find I couldn’t see my comrades from here. There were a few key boulders between this spot and their position.

  “Your littermates can’t help you now,” said one of the group. “We have your twisted life, and we will end it.”

  I thought I recognized her. She had long hair and even longer, tanned legs. She was the one that had shot me the first time.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” I said.

  “You will die no matter what you say.”

  The colonists were a motley bunch. They had skins tanned a deep brown, hair that was pulled back in knotted tangles and bows held tightly. I could see their corded muscles outstanding on every arm and neck. They were very tense.

  I lowered my hands and shrugged. “Well then, get on with it. Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

  “Your masters have trained you well,” the woman said. “This is a new tactic, and I don’t understand it yet. We hesitate, waiting for your trick to play out. We must learn so we can warn others. Your kind has invaded many valleys at once this time, but your purpose is unclear. Whatever it is, you will not be successful.”

  I frowned, not knowing what the hell she was talking about. “You sound like you’ve seen our kind before. We’re the first to come here. We’re from Earth, just as your parents were.”

  This statement seemed to surprise the girl. She gave a bark of laughter. The others hooted and bared their teeth in amusement. I got the feeling they weren’t dumb, but they’d definitely lost some social skills somewhere along the way out from Earth.

  “So strange,” she said. “You do seem to be unlike the others. How can you know of Earth? How can you know of our name for that place?”