Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (Dominant Species Series)

by David Coy

  Rachel stood up. “How much time do I have?” she asked.

  “As much as you need,” Paul said.

  Rachel cleared her throat. “I don’t have all the answers yet,” she said. “But I think I’ve got enough to give us all a good idea about where the wasps came from and how they operate, biologically speaking. More importantly, I think I understand enough to give us all a good idea about the future threat.”

  “Okay,” Paul said. “You’ve got the floor.”

  Rachel moved to the front of the gathering with her pad, turned around and scanned the worried faces in front of her.

  She smiled at them and tried to push aside the sobering thought that before her eyes were perhaps the single last remaining cluster of the species Homo sapiens. And try as she might to suppress it, the thought persisted.

  She cleared her throat again and got ready to tell them all about the little wasps that had killed eight hundred of their numbers more swiftly than an army. She would tell them that in so doing, the little wasps had decimated their remaining human gene pool, reduced it to a marginally sustainable number of breeding contributors, in a matter of just a few minutes. She would take them back a thousand years and tell them about the Verdian witches and how they had come to Earth to condition the wasps for a very special and heinous task. She would tell them about some very special people a thousand years ago—Phil Lynch, Bailey Hall, Mary Pope, Tom Moon—and Gilbert Keefer.

  She would tell them everything.

  We’ve probably lost, she thought. We’ve had our chance. We won’t be able to survive here. Nature, in the end, will not favor Homo sapiens.

  * * *

  When the wasps had done their job and laid their eggs in the human hosts and when the last of them had buzzed away into the green, all but four hundred and eleven of the colonists on Verde’s Revenge were left standing. The others lay paralyzed where they fell, their bodies slack and pliable; rag-doll imitations of humans slumped and splayed on the ground, in tubes, in shelters or in containers that weren’t completely closed when the buzzing pestilence came.

  Within hours of the attack, those who had been stung regained some control of their limbs, rose to their feet and ambled dumbly here and there, shaking off the effects of the sting-induced coma the wasps had put them in.

  And hours after that, they started to scream.

  They screamed and trembled in place or ran aimlessly in a futile attempt to get away from the hundreds of tiny mincing jaws eating them alive from the inside out.

  Unable to understand, let alone help the ones infected, the ones spared were helpless observers of the suffering of their family members and friends. By nightfall on the day of the attack, all eight hundred stung were dead, their bodies roiling with the twisting, chewing wasp larva, as they fed and grew. Loved ones watched, tortured by helplessness, and offered desperate and frantic comfort as the victims died.

  Paul Kominski and a handful of other mercenaries had been quick to mobilize themselves into the semblance of an organizing force. Assembled by Rachel, with hasty instructions about how to deal with the infection, Paul’s team directed the clean-up work that buried all eight hundred dead and infected victims six meters down in a long trench hurriedly machine-etched out of a patch of jungle a few hundred meters off the side of the road. Buried deep enough that the emerging larva would never survive the climb up out of the pit on hatching, the plague was quickly contained.

  Some looked on in numb denial. Those prone to prayer, did so and wept.

  Following the attack, Paul and his enforcers then organized an interim governing council comprised of a handful of representatives chosen at random from the ranks of the survivors. Those who complained that their presence on the council would be far more beneficial than those just chosen were warned off with a look and the wave of a rifle muzzle. It was not an elected body, but it had the advantage of quickly providing an approximation of a governing body. It would stand, Paul had said, until a proper election could be conducted and a real council installed with a proper mandate.

  One of the first actions of the council was to establish a police force. The mercenaries, guns always at the ready, were the logical choices for the duty. Deployed throughout the compound, the patrol had soon established itself as the de facto power in the colony, responsible to the new council only, with Paul Kominski as the interim authority over all. In the span of a single day, new control, though not yet operating under an official charter and the rule of law, was nonetheless established in the truncated colony. Peace was once more at hand, and newfound harmony was each colonist’s rifle-enforced right.

  It was good enough for the time being.

  The attack had left the colony enough goods, supplies and equipment for decades of sustenance for a thousand or more people—but now available for consumption by a mere fraction of that number. The relative wealth of this material, all new and neatly packaged, stored in watertight containers and stacked relatively neatly, was the lifeline for the remnants of the colony. With food and medicine, communications gear, heavy transport trucks, lifts, weapons, and self-contained shelters, all in excess, most of the survivors believed they had more than an even chance of relatively good health on the jungle planet for years to come. They could build roads, plant crops if need be, fix cuts and bruises and bites and, even worse, if it came to it. They had two medical doctors; a nurse; a dentist; a certified biologist with biohazard training; riggers; engineers; two shuttle pilots; mechanics and systems technicians. There was a wealth of tools for cutting, digging, building and fixing, as well as diagnostic equipment and a dozen new shuttles. And with the new Handford generators stacked in crates yet unopened, power enough to run it all for hundreds of years to come.

  But the wasps had reminded them that they were likely the most vulnerable of species on the planet—in spite of the wealth of goods they had dragged there with them. In the days following the attack, still numbed and shaken with grief, most would flinch cold at the imagined sound of a buzzing wasp. With vigilance raised to hyper-levels, they watched the leaves and air for any shape or sound that might reveal the virulent signature of another killing swarm of thumb-sized predatory wasps.

  * * *

  “The wasps are a weapon,” Rachel began. “They are a biological weapon in the control of a secretive, advanced race of alien beings living somewhere on this planet.” The comment started worried murmuring throughout the assembly.

  “You’d better clarify that,” a tall, scrawny man said loudly from within the crowd.

  “I will clarify it for you,” Rachel said loudly over the murmurs. “The wasps have been conditioned specifically to prey on humans only. They can’t …

  “Hang on!” someone else yelled out. “Go back to the advanced race part. What about them?”

  “The ones,” Rachel said, searching the area of the crowd she thought the voice had come from, “The ones we thought were dead, the beings we found in the monolith aren’t extinct —at least some of them are still alive—perhaps large numbers of them.”

  “You’re talking about those creatures we’ve heard about that lived in the monolith?” another overwrought woman asked.

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “We’re not sure they lived in the monolith. But, yes. Those.”

  “So are the wasps going to come back?” a woman up front said in an accusatory voice. The murmurs got louder.

  Paul rapped on the table with his pistol. “Let Rachel talk!” he barked.

  The murmuring died, and Rachel continued.

  “These beings, these Verdians, dropped millions of immature versions of the wasps on the compound. They were in something like a cocoon, in a pupated state, when they were dropped. They hatched out a few hours later, swarmed and then started to hunt for prey. We were sitting ducks for them. We never had a chance. The reason we didn’t is because the wasps had our scent—so to speak.

  “In or around the year 2006 these beings came to Earth and took hundreds of people captive. They used
the captives as hosts for the wasps and harvested the wasp larva from the bodies of the captives after the wasps laid their eggs in them.”

  “How do you know all this,” a wiry Bondsman named Jackson asked.

  Paul shot the man a look.

  “I know,” Rachel said, “because I have this.” She reached into the satchel slung around her shoulder and pulled out Bailey Hall’s blue notebook. “This notebook has a record of the entire event. It’s a diary kept by one of the captives. Her name was Bailey Hall. She and a few others planned to escape from the Verdian vessel on which this process I just described was taking place. We don’t know if they escaped or not.

  “Each of the eight hundred who died two days ago are almost certainly distant relatives of the captives taken by the Verdians over a thousand years ago on Earth. When the Verdians released the wasps, these biological weapons went after the human hosts who possessed the same genetic markers as the hosts they were harvested from a thousand years ago.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Jackson scoffed. “It makes no sense at all.”

  “Oh, it does,” Rachel said. “Look. You’ve heard of the extinct fish called a salmon, haven’t you,” she said to him.

  “Sure. I know what salmon were,” Jackson said.

  “Well, salmon as you know, in order to breed, only returned to the stream or river in which they were born. And even though scientists were never able to identify any single factor in the water that could direct them to that stream, somehow, some hidden chemical or scent in the water directed the salmon to the right stream. I think that’s what happens with the wasps. Some scent, something extremely specific to a family chain, something inherited genetically, acted like a beacon for the wasps.”

  In the back, a young man, still dressed in funeral black, said loudly, “So, they somehow knew which ones of the ones they killed had this scent, and it was the same as the scent of someone that person was related to a thousand years ago and that the wasp larva hatched out of. Right?”

  “That’s basically it,” Rachel said. “I think the Verdians have been using this wasp species for tens of thousands of years, maybe longer. I think they use them as a way to control certain species on Verde that might get out of control for some reason. I think the wasps are a highly specialized form of pest control. They might even be used to control just a single strain, a single lineage within a species.

  “When the Verdians discovered us here on their planet,” she went on, “I believe they already had a storehouse of specialized wasps on hand trained just for our scent. They must have preserved them or had them in some kind suspended animation. I’m not sure. That’s my theory anyway. All they had to do was dump them near us and let the wasps do the rest. I think that the wasps can be conditioned to be specialized, but that they can only breed in the host gene pool they were born in. Nowhere else. They can’t just spontaneously jump from species to species or even within species between varieties. They can’t even jump from one lineage to another. If they can’t find more prey of the same lineage as the host they hatch out of, they probably die without breeding again. So each specialized batch of wasps self-extinct in short order. They are perfect for this kind of work. The Verdians, I think, have cultured this species for this particular job for maybe eons. I even doubt whether or not the wasps can live without the specialized conditioning process of the Verdians. They may not be able to live as a viable species without intervention. But that’s just a theory.”

  “So the Verdians think we’re pests?” a woman asked, unable to conceive of her place on the planet as anything other than superior.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Rachel replied.

  “I don’t get it,” Jackson said. “How come we’re still alive then?”

  “We’re still alive,” Rachel replied, “because there were no wasps in the batch the Verdians dumped on us that had hatched out of any of our distant relatives. I’m not sure why that’s so. Those are answers I don’t have yet. But I suspect the answer may be as simple as that. None of our own distant relatives were captured or made part of the harvesting process during the visit to Earth. That’s the only thing that comes to mind right now.”

  “So the attack on Earth was incomplete?” Donna asked. “They didn’t get enough of the larva harvested?”

  “That’s my theory,” Rachel replied. “Bailey Hall makes some notes in her diary that suggests that the Verdians came to Earth to eradicate us as a species. In order to succeed, they would have had to collect members of lineages to a certain inherited depth from all over the planet. I think they failed. Bailey Hall and her group may have had something to do with that. I don’t know. Her diary suggests they did.”

  “Okay,” Jackson persisted. “So are the wasps coming back or not?”

  She looked at Jackson and smiled a little. It was a difficult concept to explain without something to write on, and she wished she’d had time to create some visuals to make clearer what she was trying to communicate.

  “When the wasps attacked, they reduced our numbers from over a thousand to two four and eleven individuals. The wasps have put our population numbers below the critical breeding mass required for a species to recover without significant inbreeding in two generations—if left to chance. Left alone, with no additional threats, and by paying special attention to who mates with who, we might have a chance to recover as a gene pool. But this planet is dangerous. It’s dangerous from the ground up to the canopy. Something biting, stinging and usually dangerous lives under every leaf. In terms of biological hazards, I’ve just scratched the surface. And if we lose even ten percent of our remaining number…” She put her hands on her hips. “The bottom line is that, if I’m right, the wasps are no longer usable to the Verdians as a weapon against us. Our numbers are too small. Few, if any of us, belong to the same direct lineage so there is no way to condition the wasps against us.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Look, the wasps don’t matter. There’s more to worry about than the wasps,” she said. “They’re just the tip of the iceberg.”

  21

  Smith was being stupid the way Paul figured it. He could stay in the orbiter until he starved to death if he wanted to, but threatening to blow it up in exchange for a full amnesty was a bargaining strategy that was beginning to grate. The orbiter still had supplies and equipment the colony could use, and Paul didn’t want to run the risk of losing any of it. He’d had just about enough of this shit from Smith. The worst of it was that with the exception of this single channel, he’d turned off the communications satellites, effectively truncating the colony’s phone service.

  As far as they could tell, only four people remained on the orbiter: Smith, his personal assistant Ashwin and two others; one Daniel Wethers and one Ralph Lindstrom, neither of whom Paul knew much about except that they had been employed by Smith since the orbiter arrived over two Verdian years ago. The four had sequestered themselves in the orbiter right after the wasp storm and had refused to come down. Worse, they had closed off the orbiter’s boarding docks from the inside and set them to secure, precluding any attempt to dock with the orbiter in a foray designed to drag them out by force. They had also changed the access codes to all of the orbiter’s systems, making it impossible to reconfigure or redirect any of the orbiter’s functions. Without those codes, the orbiter was simply a dumb, giant hull filled with enough food and water and air to last years.

  The holdouts wouldn’t be able to fly the orbiter away, principally because they didn’t have the engineers to do it. The other reason: Where would they fly it to that made any sense? The existing colonized planets were dead or nearly so. Fuji was a mineral-rich ball with few organic resources and dependent on a supply chain from Earth since its opening. With Earth now all but dead itself, Fuji would soon follow. Cunningham Moors, though richer with life, was still dependent on Earth’s now empty supply line. Reports told of widespread starvation there.

  The orbiter was built to move enormous amounts of material
from one point in space to another and lacked the propulsive resources to act as an exploratory vessel. Even if they had an idea where to go for sanctuary, the orbiter was not capable of making the trip. So, for Smith and his little crew, there was simply nowhere to go.

  But in terms of what the orbiter was or wasn’t able to do while it was in orbit over the planet, Smith was clearly holding the cards for now, and Paul didn’t like it.

  The two things Paul wanted was to get Smith down to face justice and to safeguard the orbiter and its contents— the latter his first concern.

  “Try Smith again,” Paul said to communications specialist. “Let’s see what he has to say today.”

  “Looking for more abuse, Captain?” the tech, a fresh-faced young man named Adams, asked.

  “I’ve got nothing better to with my time for the moment,” Paul said. “Dial up the bastard.”

  The tech punched at the console and the system rang Smith’s number. His slightly disheveled image appeared a moment later on the screen.

  “Yes?” Smith said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Smith,” Paul said cheerfully. “Are you ready to resume our negotiations?”

  “Of course,” Smith said. “Remind me. Where did we leave off?”

  Paul grinned a sideways grin. Smith knew precisely where they had left off. “You were telling me when we spoke last that you would do something like blow up the orbiter if I didn’t grant you a pardon for your crimes. Some bullshit like that I think.”

  “I will do it,” Smith said.

  “I don’t see what you’ve got to gain,” Paul said matter-of-factly. “If I’m not mistaken the blast would kill you.”

  “That’s the price I’m willing to pay. You can have the orbiter when you agree to absolve me of all the alleged crimes I am supposed to have committed.”