A Season for Slaughter watc-4

by David Gerrold

  A Season for Slaughter

  ( War Against the Chtorr - 4 )

  David Gerrold

  As tenacious aliens transform the war torn Earth into a replica of their own terrifying world, a handful of scientists, soldiers, and citizens prepares to fight back.

  The War Against the Chtorr Book 4

  A Season for Slaughter

  David Gerrold

  For Ben and Barbara Bova

  … with love.

  THANK YOU:

  Dennis Ahrens, Seth Breidbar, Jack Cohen, Richard Curtis, Diane Duane, Raymond E. Feist, Richard Fontana, Bill Glass, Harvey and Johanna Glass, David Hartwell, Robert and Ginny Heinlein, Karen Malcor, Lydia Marano, Susie Miller, Tom Negrino, Jerry Pournelle, Alan Rodgers, Rick Sternbach, Amy Stout, Tom Swale, Linda Wright, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Howard Zimmerman

  SPECIAL THANKS TO:

  Bill Aycock, Robert E. Bellus, William Benson, George S. Brickner, Dan Corrigan, Randy Dannenfelser, Pamela and Randy Harbaugh, Mark E. Herlihy, Chris Keavy, John Robison, Lee Ann Rucker, Harry Sameshima, Kurt C. Siegel, W. Christopher Swett, The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), Kathryn Beth Willig, and others.

  For their generous donations to the AIDS Project of Los Angeles, characters in this book have been named after these people or individuals of their choice. The behavior and/or bad habits of the named characters are decisions made by the author for the purposes of the story only, and should not be seen as a representation of the actual person, nor interpreted to mean derogatory intent on the part of the author.

  Chtorr (ktôr), n. 1. The planet Chtorr, presumed to exist within 30 light-years of Earth. 2. The star system in which the planet occurs, presently unidentified. 3. The Chtorran ecology; the living system comprised of all the processes and particles of the Chtorran ecology. 4. In formal usage, either one or many members of the ruling species of the planet Chtorr. Obsolete. (See Chtor-ran) 5. The glottal chirruping cry of a Chtorran gastropede.

  Chtorran (ktôr in), adj.

  1. Of or relating to either the planet or the star system, Chtorr. 2. Native to Chtorr. n. 1. Any creature native to Chtorr. 2. In common usage, a member of the primary species of Chtorr, the worm-like gastropede. (pl. Chtor-rans)

  -The Random House Dictionary of the English Language Century 21 Edition, expanded.

  There are two facts you need to know about the Chtorran ecology:

  1) It has grown beyond our ability to investigate and understand; it is therefore also beyond our ability to contain or destroy.

  2) It is unstable.

  —The Red Book,

  (Release 22.19A)

  Chapter 1

  The Stench

  "Ninety percent of success is just growing up."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  We smelled it long before we saw it.

  The stench came rolling over the hills like a force of nature. I thought of great billowing thunderclouds of microscopic particles. I thought of corrosive chemicals attacking my bronchi, bizarre molecules bonding to enzyme sites in my bloodstream and liver. I thought of tiny alien creatures setting up housekeeping in my lungs. I thought of emigrating to the moon. Anything to be away from here.

  The smell was almost a visible presence, and it was strong enough to knock down a house. Even filtered through the hoods, it was intolerable. It smelled like everything bad in the world, all in one place and distilled down to its most horrible essence. It smelled like putrefaction in a perfume factory. It smelled like day-old vomit and burning sulfur, swamp gas and rotten cheese. It smelled like worms and lawyers and last year's politics.

  "Hooa! Lordy! What is that?" hollered one of the Texas boys. "Did we hit a skunk?"

  "Smells more like lawyer."

  "What's the difference?"

  "Nobody wants to hit a skunk."

  "Welcome to Mexico," said somebody in the back. "Land of a thousand exciting adventures."

  "Cap'n," asked one of the new kids. "You ever smelled anything like that before?"

  Before I could speak, the same voice in the back replied nastily, "It's the barrio. This is the largest one in the world. They all smell like that."

  "Only until we flush the gringos out." I recognized Lopez's softly accented voice. "It's the leftover mayonnaise and white bread you're smelling."

  "Cool it," I said. "You've got more important things to worry about. A smell like that is strong enough to attract every carrion eater from here to Waco. Pass the word. Keep an eye out." My eyes were already starting to water, but I didn't dare lift my contamination hood to wipe them.

  We were in the leading rollagon. Behind us followed a convoy of four more. We bounced across the denuded hills like a deranged herd of dinosaurs. The deforestation here hadn't been recent, but it had been thorough. Nothing was going to grow here again for a long, long time. Obviously, no Chtorran agency had been responsible for this. What a stupid war this was turning out to be-we were supposed to be defending the Terran ecology; instead we were burning it away, destroying it to save it.

  According to the original plan, Terran plants should have been reasserting themselves by now. There should have been sprouts of green everywhere. Instead-we had a barren moonscape; a rumpled ash-colored terrain of uncomfortable hills and broken rock, all punctuated by blackened spikes, the remnants of a dead forest. A faint pink haze lay across the land; it gathered itself in dark brown pools and lurked in the deep gullies between the hills; and I wondered if this was the source of the smell. The pervasive undercast hid the horizon behind a bleary gray veil; distance just faded away into nothingness. Was this pale dry fog something Chtorran or another one of the delights engineered in the Oakland labs? It couldn't be the product of a living thing, could it? Nothing could live in this stench.

  There was life here, of a sort; desperate, hungry, futile-and mostly Chtorran, of course. There were black ropy vines stretched across the ground, pulling at it like anchoring cables; and there were things growing on the vines, occasional bright patches of pink or blue or white, not quite flowers, but not quite anything else either. There were patches of dark ultraviolet fungus and occasional curtains of red gauze hanging from dead tree limbs. Deep in the shadowed gullies we could see thick rubbery scars of wormberry, and the occasional clump of leafy black basil. As we rolled on, we started seeing purple coleus, midnight ivy, and the first bright patches of scarlet kudzu.

  The kudzu was turning out to be especially nasty. All it did was grow, but that was enough. It looked like blood-colored ivy, and it grew even faster than its Terran counterpart. It could blanket a house in weeks, a forest in months. You could cut it back easily enough, but you could never quite eradicate it completely. It just kept coming back. It had the tenacity of a bill collector-only quieter. In Georgia a small army of civilians had burned back several hundred acres of it that was starting to get too close to the edge of Atlanta and found the bones of cattle; dogs, cats, and more than a few missing people. No one was quite sure of the killing mechanism yet—or even if there was one. Maybe its danger was in its thickness; it was the perfect ground cover for small Chtorran predators. Like all things Chtorran, the best advice was still avoid it if you can.

  Unless, of course, your job was to seek it out. Then you didn't have the luxury of that option.

  This particular expedition was here at the specific request of the provisional governor of the Territory of North Mexico. We were one of three doing on-site mapping of the northeastern wilderness, to determine the success of last year's defoliation. I already knew the answer. I could have told them the answer before we'd left, before we'd even planned this operation. But-there are people who don't believe anything until they've sent somebody else to see-and even then, if it disagrees wi
th what they want to hear, they still won't believe it.

  The Brazilian mission had been sent back for reconsideration or put on hold or shifted to a back burner or ticketed for reevaluation or whatever you wanted to call it for the ninth or eleventh or hundred and third time. None of it had anything to do with the mission. All of it had everything to do with the political relationship of the North American Authority and the remaining nations of South America, several of which, including Brazil, had not reacted well to the Authority's recent annexation of South Mexico after that country's army and government had both collapsed in disarray. The relief operation was mounted from bases provided by the government of North Mexico. Despite, or perhaps because of, that cooperation, serious charges were being raised in many Latin capitals that the collapse of South Mexico had been engineered north of the Rio Grande.

  I had no personal knowledge of the incident. I'd been involved elsewhere at the time, participating in an experiment in brainwashing, one of several then in practice. But I wouldn't have been surprised to find an American presence in the matter. South Mexico's not-so-secret-anymore cooperation with the Fourth World Majority in the abortive Gulf Coast invasion had not exactly won them friends in the hallowed halls of Congress. When it also turned out that they had allowed the invading forces to establish clandestine staging areas in the eastern wilderness, sixteen bills to declare war on South Mexico were introduced in the Senate. The President vowed to veto every one. The war against the Chtorr, she said, was more important, and this particular matter would be resolved in its own time and in its own way. She didn't specify what she meant, but after that the discussions on Capitol Hill became much more restrained.

  Not too long after that, the United States and Canada created the North American Operations Authority, and each nation ceded specific parts of its national sovereignty to the new body; in particular the jurisdiction of all military and scientific bodies immediately involved in combating the ecological infestation. Both Mexicos had also been invited, but only the Republic of North Mexico had joined, and that only in exchange for significant trade agreements.

  The obvious advantage of the Authority was that it allowed the United States to set the Moscow Treaties aside without specifically violating them. Giving control of your military to another body, which you just happened to control, was about as transparent as a lawyer's promise, but nevertheless legal. Not that anybody cared anymore, but the whole of politics is to find a way to legalize your particular crime. Politicians have different priorities from real people.

  That the government of South Mexico had collapsed six months later was only a coincidence: So I'm told. It takes longer than six months to deliberately topple a government. If it can be toppled in six months, it was already on its way out anyway. For the protection of the, people, the Authority annexed the territory and . : . here we were, picking up the pieces of a project that somebody else had started.

  And in the meantime, the Brazilians weren't speaking to us. They'd come around, eventually, but who knew how long that would take?

  Abruptly, the smell got worse. I wouldn't have believed it possible.

  They say you get used to even the worst smells. Not true. What happens is that your olfactory nerves shrivel into insensibility, refusing to come out again for two years afterward, not even when tempted with the most alluring scents of all: steak, buttered potatoes, chocolate ice cream, hot fudge, fresh strawberries, new car smells, fresh money-nothing.

  This smell, the new one, lay across the previous stench like chocolate icing on a skunk. Neither smell was happy about it. The truly awful thing was that I recognized the smell.

  The screen in front of me showed our location on the contour-delineated terrain. The depth was deliberately exaggerated to compensate for the limitations of human senses. I touched a button and noted for the mission log that we had encountered olfactory evidence of a fumble of gorps, also called gorths, gnorths, and glorbs, depending on who you were talking to. The military designation was ghoul.

  This was a very bad sign.

  Gorps or ghouls were scavengers, garbage-eaters, carrionfeeders. Fully mature, they stood three to four meters tall. A gorp was a sloth-shaped tower of hair. It had a barrel chest, a flexible prognathous snout, numerous small nasty eyes, and an attitude almost as bad as its smell. Its coat was a filth-ridden, flea-infested, rust-colored, dirty mass of coarse stringy hair and age-hardened mats. Its arms were disturbingly long, and the things it used for hands and feet were immense. Gorps were Chtorran bag ladies.

  They ranged in color from startling orange to glow-in-the-dark brown. Sometimes they shambled along in a vaguely upright stance; most of the time they lumbered on all fours. Because they moved in slow motion, like koala bears, some people made the mistake of thinking they were gentle beings. It was not a mistake that anyone had lived long enough to make twice. Gorps were about as gentle as rhinoceroses. Think of a gorp as a giant, rabid, psychopathic, mutated, hydrocephalic orangutan with the mother of all hangovers-and you were working in the right direction. But this was a complimentary description; on a bad day, a gorp looked even worse.

  It wasn't simply that a gorp could do you physical harm; it could, and it would, if you annoyed it long enough; no, the real horror was that its bouquet alone could raise blisters on a boulder. What a concentrated dose would do to human lungs was presumed fatal.

  A gorp knew only two words: "Gorp?" and "Gorth!" The former was a questioning gulping sound, halfway between a yawn and a bark. The latter was a low-pitched rumble, which was generally interpreted as a warning growl.

  Gorps were the biggest slobs in the Chtorran ecology. They damaged everything they came near. After a fumble of gorps wandered through a neighborhood, it looked like the aftermath of a blood feud between tornadoes. It wasn't malicious; they weren't angry creatures; it was simply the naked curiosity of a hungry scavenger raised to a new low. Even those few things that gorps occasionally left undamaged behind them carried their incredible reek for weeks afterward.

  Gorps were always a bad sign. They weren't particularly wicked by themselves, and they were easy enough to avoid; their far-reaching smell usually gave enough advance warning that you could move to another state before they arrived in your neighborhood. Even if you weren't that smart, their lack of speed made it easy for you to keep out of their way; anyone who got caught by a gorp did it deliberately.

  But the presence of gorps almost always meant that there was either a major infestation of worms nearby-or a grove of shambler trees. Probably shamblers. Even though Gorps preferred to live on the garbage of the worms, it was safer to trail the shamblers and feed upon the leavings of their tenants. Their appetites were ghoulish; hence the military designation.

  My headset beeped abruptly-"McCarthy here," I answered.

  "What is it, Captain?" The voice was Major Bellus. Major Robert E. Bellus, officially just an observer. Unofficially, I didn't know; but I had my suspicions. I'd met him only three days earlier. He was riding in the rear tank. The comfortable one.

  "It's nothing, sir."

  "But the smell-?"

  "Gorps-or gorths. Or ghouls. But they could be miles from here. They might be rutting. We know that there are certain times when their stench gets strong enough to be detectable a hundred klicks away. The skyballs don't show anything within a radius of five, but their visibility is down due to the haze."

  "Go to the satellite view and scan-"

  "I already have, sir," I said patiently. "There are no mandalas in this sector. No clusters of huts, no single huts. No evidence of worms at,all. We're smelling either a migratory fumble of gorps, which I doubt, or they're following a grove of shamblers, which I consider much more likely. The skyballs are scanning for the herd now. Sir." I added.

  Bellus paused.

  I knew what he was thinking. Three days ago he'd abruptly taken control of this mission with the reassuring words, "I'm only here as an observer, you understand?" I understood. He was taking control. My job
was to make him look good. Now he was considering whether or not to slap me down for being insubordinate or compliment me on doing my job.

  "Very well. Carry on," he said sourly.

  Right.

  Prior to our coming through with rollagons and tanks, we had sent thirty-six spiders and over a hundred skyballs through this area. Neither worms nor humans had been seen here as recently as three days ago. There were some broken roads to be found, and the occasional abandoned ruin, but there was no evidence of any postdefoliation survival.

  The military spiders were now programmed to burn worms automatically, as well as any humans in officially designated renegade-controlled areas, but they weren't yet programmed to target shamblers. The software couldn't make all the necessary discriminations yet, and Oakland was still playing it safe.

  Unfortunately, the shamblers were turning out to be almost as dangerous as worms and renegades. They were tall and ficuslike, with interwoven columnar trunks; where the trunks split, the limbs stretched upward into tangles of thick ropy branches and dark snakey looking vines; but the shamblers were always blanketed with symbiotic partners, so no two individuals ever looked the same. Some were tall and dark, burnished with large shiny leaves and gauzy lacelike nets; others were slender and bony, but fluffed out with cottony pink tufts of nascent flowering; and still others were horticultural ragamuffins, a patchwork of colors, dripping down off the towering growth like a shower of banners and veils.

  By themselves, the shamblers would have been obvious. But the landscape they wandered through was no longer completely Terran; it was dotted here and there with clusters of tenacious infestation; red kudzu and mottled creeper vines, cold blue iceplant and cloying purple fungi, black vampire ivy and wandering wormberry, all of them spreading as rapidly as a nasty rumor. The way the Chtorran infestation rolled over everything-trees, buildings, signs, boulders, abandoned cars-everything looked the same, differing only in the height and breadth of the lump it made in the landscape. So how could you tell if any specific lump was a shambler-especially when a shambler could look like anything?