Death World

by B. V. Larson

  Sargon shrugged. “I don’t like this. I prefer a stand-up fight.”

  Knowing just how he felt, I nodded thoughtfully. “We’ve got to get out of here. We’ll circle around to the north by walking up that ridge.”

  “That’s a root, Vet, not a ridge,” Carlos pointed out.

  “I know that! Every rise of the land in this region is a root.”

  We hustled up the root. I took point, not having the heart to order another to do it. On my tapper, I marked the spot and declared Lau and Gorman dead. As our tappers weren’t hooked to any wider area network than our own local squad command channel, it didn’t mean much. But if someone found us later on, at least the deaths would be confirmed, and they would be cleared for revival.

  It was a longshot, but I felt I wanted to play this little adventure by the book from now on.

  “Claver’s gone,” Kivi said when we’d climbed upward a hundred meters or so.

  “What do you mean, gone?” I demanded.

  She looked at me guiltily. “I’ve replayed the vid file. The space under the tree was confined, and the buzzer, well, it’s programmed to get closer to targets if they’re sleeping or at least holding still. Claver nailed it. I guess that’s what he was really doing—luring in the AI on my buzzer.”

  “Well then, send another one after him!” I shouted.

  “I did, I did.”

  “Where is he?”

  “So far, no contact. He’s fled the region. I’ve got the drone on a spiraling search pattern going out from the tree in widening circles.”

  “I know what a frigging spiral is,” I growled. “Shit.”

  What made me the maddest was that we’d been outsmarted by Claver. He was a slippery man, probably the slipperiest I’d ever encountered. He’d been playing us from the beginning, setting traps and seeking to lose our pursuit.

  Right then and there, on the graves of Lau and Gorman, I vowed to catch the man. We might all be as good as permed on this poisonous deathtrap of a planet, but I was going to get Claver before this was over.

  -26-

  We pressed ahead, traveling in the direction we hoped Claver had gone. Soon, we came into a region full of a new variety of plant. We’d never seen the like of it before. Instead of ferns and massive trees, there were vines here, vines with heavy pods hanging from them. The pods dragged on the ground like ripe fruit.

  Now, when I say there were vines, a person might mistakenly envision a sweet little beanstalk. Something a few meters high with bright green leaves. That’s not the kind of vine I’m talking about. First off, the leaves were crackling and brown as if they were dying. They were much bigger than any vine back on Earth, about ten meters high on average. The pods hanging from these vines were a dark, waxy green. Sort of like cucumbers, gargantuan cucumbers the size of SUVs that lay on the bare earth, growing fat and shiny.

  “Don’t touch any of these things!” I ordered.

  My squad didn’t need much encouragement in that department. They warily avoided contact with the scary-looking vegetation as we walked into the garden.

  My admonishment turned out to be a good idea. There were spines on the pods, we learned as we got in among them. Red, hair-thin spines that glistened with some kind of clear liquid.

  “I think we should roast this whole field,” Sargon said. “We’ve got some grenades and incendiary agents. If we light them up, they might all burn.”

  “Might be a good idea,” I admitted, “but then again, they might all hatch and eat us instead.”

  “I’ve got him!” Kivi said suddenly. “I’ve picked up Claver again!”

  I trotted gingerly around a few spiny cucumbers to her position. “Show me.”

  She did, and I experienced my first grim smile of the day. Claver was in the center of this vast field we were attempting to cross. He was at a central nodule, a nexus point where all these vines came together. He was walking around the spot, examining it carefully.

  “What do you think he’s looking for?” I asked Kivi.

  “I’ve got no idea,” she admitted.

  Thinking hard for a second, I turned back to Sargon. “We’re going to try your idea.”

  “Great!” he said, clapping his gauntlets together and digging in his pack. “I’ll set them up on a timer. Everyone give me all the phosphorous you’ve got, grenades too. We’ll retreat to the edge of the field long before—”

  “No,” I said.

  “No what?”

  “We’re not retreating. We’re advancing. Set up the firebomb behind us. We’ll head for Claver’s position.”

  “Are you sure about that, Vet?” Sargon asked. “You might burn us all alive. See these brown leaves? Notice the high oxygen levels? This will burn hot! Hell, even the breeze is heading toward the center of the field.”

  “I know all that. We’ll move fast, and if Claver hides or doubles back on us again, there will be a fire right behind us he can’t escape. He’s not getting away again. If we don’t get him, the fire will.”

  No one looked happy with my plan. Kivi walked up and put a hand on mine.

  “James,” she said. “That’s not what we were ordered to do. We were ordered to follow Claver and find out what he’s up to.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, let me clue you in: that’s never going to work. He knows we’re after him, and he’s not going to lead us anywhere but to our deaths. He’ll just keep setting up traps for us.”

  “How do you know that, McGill?” Carlos demanded.

  “Because I’ve dealt with this man on three planets. You don’t just let Claver loose and expect him to do what you want. That’s never going to happen. Drusus doesn’t understand what we are dealing with.”

  “What do you think he’s really up to out here?” Kivi asked, watching her tapper again.

  “Honestly?” I asked. “I’m not sure. But I am certain it involves getting all of us killed. If we keep following him blindly, he’ll figure out a way to do it. Only at that point, if he feels like it, will he go and talk to his plant friends.”

  They looked scared and uncertain, but no one openly argued with me.

  “Okay,” I continued, “build your bomb and set it up, Sargon. The rest of you spread out and advance—but try not to touch the spines. Armor or not, I don’t like the look of them.”

  Ten minutes later, we were advancing in a line, trotting through the vines. Behind us, a short fuse was ticking. Sargon had tried to set it for half an hour, defeating my entire plan. Fortunately, I’d checked his work and reset it to ninety-seconds. That got the squad moving.

  A blast of heat and light loomed behind us before we’d gone a hundred meters. Maybe I’d set it wrong, or maybe a minute and half just wasn’t all that long under these circumstances. We couldn’t move quickly enough through this field, picking our way from plant to plant.

  “Show me Claver!” I ordered when I levered myself back up off the ground. Burning bits of vegetation were raining down on us. That part made me happy. I hated these plants.

  Kivi piped in a view of Claver. He was no longer toying with the central nexus of the vine plant. He was up and rushing around, looking for something.

  Then suddenly, he loomed close to the camera position. I got it then. He was looking for the drone. He came up to our faces, snarling.

  “You dumb-asses!” he shouted at the camera. “You just killed us all!”

  I felt a chill run through my bones, despite the steamy heat of the planet. I could tell he meant what he was saying.

  He went to smash the buzzer, but he missed. The drone went straight upward as Kivi was driving it higher on full power. I heard a distant popping sound. Was Claver shooting at it?

  “Do you still have him?” I asked Kivi.

  “I think so. He found that buzzer like a pro. But I hid it among the spines on a pod. I bet he might have caught a few of them when he tried to smash it.

  “Serves him right,” I said.

  Looking over my shoulder, I saw the flames were lick
ing the dry fields eagerly.

  “Let’s pick up the pace!” I ordered, and we charged deeper toward the center.

  Now and then I was forced to slash a vine or stomp right over a pod in my metal boots. That wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded as we were wearing armor. But what I didn’t like about it was any possible effect it might have on the pods themselves. So far, they hadn’t displayed any form of defensive capability. But that was far from conclusive as we’d only just started damaging them directly.

  When the pods finally did react, it was in a big way. The pods didn’t like getting burned, apparently. When the flame reached them, they woke up—or whatever was growing inside them did. Creatures loomed out of those waxy, oblong cocoons. They were instantly wreathed in flame and therefore difficult to identify.

  Blinded by fire, the large, squatty creatures clawed and staggered as if they were sleeping animals rudely awakened into an inferno. Standing around five meters tall, their alien bodies weren’t shaped like men at all. They were more like spiders. Multi-legged monsters with spiny hair that burned merrily as they died.

  “Holy shit,” Carlos breathed. “Do you see those things, McGill? Are all these pods ripening with monsters like that?”

  “I would expect so,” I said. “Keep moving before the ones around us get the word.”

  My orders came too late. The message seemed to have been telegraphed up the burning vines to all the pods we were marching past. One broke free to my right, making a squelching sound like a man shoving a foot into a wet rubber boot. It was right in the middle of my squad, and we couldn’t go around without getting closer to the advancing flames.

  This spider wasn’t on fire yet, so I could see it clearly. It had the same orange fronds, the same kind of sensory organs that I’d seen on the creatures born of the trees. The fronds were immediately alert. They scanned and spotted us quickly.

  “Cut it down!” I shouted, and we opened up with our morph-rifles.

  Most of us had our weapons set up for close-assault mode, and we lashed the monster with fire, but it didn’t go down easily. Taking two staggering steps into a storm of bullets, the thing flipped over, thrashing. It got back up, but we blasted it back down again. We had too much firepower pouring into its body for it to struggle up a third time. It was still heaving and steaming when we marched right over it.

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, McGill,” Carlos said. “No one I’ve ever served under could come up with a better way to get his squad killed.”

  “Shut up. We’re not dead yet.”

  Miraculously, Carlos did shut up. Maybe he was saving his breath to run.

  We had to kill three more spiders before we reached the nexus. The last two came on together, converging on us from both sides. Sargon caught one with his belcher, nailing it right in the belly. The weaponeer had been knocked flat and was lying on his back at the time, aiming up into its guts—but still, it was a beautiful shot. The thing gushed out thick hot liquids and died.

  The last spider also got in close—too close for rifle fire. We hacked it apart with force-blades. It was nasty work, and we lost another trooper, but we won past it.

  Behind us, our squad’s pig wasn’t so lucky. All this time, our ox-sized drone had been trotting dutifully in our wake like a faithful pet. But the vines were a problem for its navigational software. The doomed thing hadn’t been able to keep up.

  One of the spider-beasts came out of the burning perimeter and charged close, sensing the drone somehow, despite the fact the spider was on fire itself. Maybe the drone’s heavy, vibrating tread had given it away.

  Whatever the case, the spider jumped on the supply drone’s back and rode it down to earth. Tearing at it and ripping sacks of supplies off, the spider began making a kind of shrieking sound. Maybe it was happy to get a little revenge, I don’t know.

  “Shit!” Carlos called out. “Oh shit, we have to go back! That thing has all our gear—our food!”

  “Be my guest, Specialist,” I said.

  “Dammit, McGill. I’m not going to be a taste-tester once if we get out of here. You can just forget about that.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of asking,” I said. “That’s Kivi’s job.”

  Kivi hadn’t been listening to our radio chatter, but she heard her name mentioned.

  “Keep them moving, McGill,” she said. “We’re almost there. The center of this garden is dead ahead.”

  We broke through the twisting field of vines and came out into the open. Instead of being like curtains in our way, the vines were now strung up high, like power wires hanging from pylons.

  There, we found a squat central mass. It was in the center of about a hundred vines, each of which radiated out to a long line of pods.

  The big central nexus reminded me immediately of those barrel-like cacti they had in Earth’s deserts. Round, but not a sphere, it stood tall and was almost as thick around as it was high. More striking than its girth, however, was its vast collection of spines.

  While watching Claver poke around this thing on video, it hadn’t looked like much. But now that we were up close, I could see the spines were each the size of a sword. They were more than meter long and tapered to a perfect point. The core of the plant wasn’t anything a man could mess with easily.

  “What do we do now?” Carlos demanded. “I don’t see Claver.”

  “You want me to blast that thing, Vet?” Sargon demanded.

  “No, hold on. Circle around and look for Claver. Kivi, did you see where he went?”

  “My buzzer is still searching the area. He has to be here—but I don’t have him on my vid stream right now. The smoke…”

  The smoke was getting heavy. We’d outrun the fire, but it hadn’t burnt out. I had the feeling it was going to consume the entirety of this spider-growing patch before it was through. The surrounding undergrowth of the forest itself was a lot wetter and probably wouldn’t burn—but this dry patch was toast.

  We spread out and looked all around the glade. Claver had vanished. The smoke got thicker, and I was getting desperate.

  “Dammit,” I shouted a minute or so later, “he must have given us the slip again. I can’t believe it!”

  “Vet?” Sargon called.

  I glanced over at him. He aimed his belcher at the central nexus meaningfully.

  “I guess you might as well blast it,” I said. “We’ll destroy this thing and then move out of the patch on the far side before the fire gets here.”

  Sargon sighted and cranked his aperture to a narrow beam. He planned to punch holes in it, I could tell, and I approved.

  “STOP!” roared a voice.

  We all spun around and stared.

  Claver stood up right in our midst. He’d been buried, I guess, under our feet. The big cactus-thing had gripped our attention and we’d walked right over him in our haste to enter the center of the field.

  Dirt dripped from him, and his face was lit with a gleam that I might have mistaken for madness. But I knew Claver…he always had an angle.

  -27-

  Claver walked up to me like he hadn’t a care about what I might do to him. A wall of fire wasn’t a hundred meters behind him. A throng of dying, burning, screeching spiders was out there too, in the fields all around us. On top of all that, he had a dozen rifles aimed at his chest. Any one of us could have cut him down with the twitch of a finger, but he didn’t care.

  He approached me with an angry air, like he was an officer who’d just found the dumbest recruit in the legion and planned on a giving the boy a thrashing.

  “You,” he breathed, staring into my faceplate. “I should have known. No one else could have screwed this up so thoroughly. What’s wrong with your brain, son?”

  “They say it’s genetic,” I said, “but I don’t believe them. My parents were more or less normal.”

  “Listen,” Claver said. “We don’t have much time. You’ve caught me—that’s what you wanted, right? Just leave the nexus alone, and we’ll move out. We c
an still make it out of here.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the massive, barrel-like plant. “What’s so special about this giant cactus?” I asked.

  “That’s one of them—one of the megaflora.”

  “I thought the trees were the megaflora.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t have time for this—”

  I reached out with my rifle barrel and tapped him meaningfully on the chest. “We have enough time for a few more answers. We can outrun these spider things. They only wake up when they get lit on fire.”

  Claver’s eyes rolled up in his head. It was an expression of disbelief and exasperation. I’d seen it countless times before, but usually on the faces of women I’d dated.

  “I don’t even know what they’ll do—this is unprecedented,” he said.

  “In that case, you’d better start making sense,” I said. “Sargon over there has an itchy trigger finger. Since you seem to care more about the cactus than you do your own life, you should probably talk faster.”

  Claver’s eyes went to Sargon then back to me. “All right. I didn’t think you’d go this far. I guess I’d forgotten that Legion Varus is the scourge of the known galaxy.”

  “That’s us.”

  “Can we at least start walking out of here?” he asked.

  I considered. “All right. Squad—move out. Walking pace.”

  Claver clearly wanted to move faster. He began to trot every dozen steps, but I reached out and yanked him back to a walking pace. I figured it was an incentive to get his facts straight.

  “Okay,” Claver said, “this is big, McGill. Bigger than a patch of alien spiders. You’ve done a lot of damage out here, but we still might be able to convince them that you didn’t know who you were dealing with. We might be able to get out of this alive.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve died before.”

  “No, I’m not talking about individual deaths. I’m talking about the death of our species, not just you and your squad. You see, this nexus isn’t just operating a few spiders and spiny plants. This is a brain. A central node in a vast nervous system that covers most of this planet.”