Barnard sighed and then went back to watching the Earth eat itself. “Very well, Colonel.”
“Sir,” said the Colonel refusing to release the old man’s attention just yet.
“What is it, Colonel?” he asked before realization hit him, “Oh.”
He opened his jacket and slid a small manila envelop from his inside breast pocket. He possessed a few dozen of the packets, left to him should Maria not return from her visit to Virginia. Some of the first Greenfly rescue missions had been to that facility, but both she and Lassiter had remained missing.
“I suppose I’ve inherited this duty,” he said, handing the envelope to the major, “I believe there’s now an extra vial in there for each of your remaining troops. If it won’t impair your performance or judgment…”
“No sir,” replied the Colonel, “I’ll see to it that it won’t. Thank you, sir.”
“We’ve had scientists and analysts down below debriefing the Whaleship brain nearly constantly since we came aboard. With explosive charges fixed to its case, it seems most forthcoming,” Barnard said, staring back out into space but indicating the Colonel should stay, “It tells us that we remind it uncannily of the Architects. Though we are less advanced, we employ the same tactics, the same logic. Each of their synthetic races possessed limitations that made them dependent upon the Architects. The Greenflies had no control over their own blood supply or comprehension of simple tools. The Harvesters could be brought to heel with any number of chemical substances. They are quite vulnerable in that capacity, as you discovered. The Whaleships were built with an over-developed sense of self-preservation and no means of self-protection against an Architect already in the passenger section. In short, the Architects controlled their Whaleships in the same way we are controlling ours, by holding a gun to its head. Slavery is evidently four billion years old.
“While it is being mum on the subject, I don’t believe the Architects simply met their extinction. I believe they were driven there, perhaps in the same manner in which Earth is currently dying. Or perhaps the Architects met their death at the claws of the Greenfly’s first domesticated species. I suspect the Whaleships rebelled. Greenflies fed by the free Whaleships would have followed by necessity. Harvesters could live within the Whaleships, repairing age and damage over the years.
“I intend to give you and your men another option, Colonel,” said Barnard. “The Whaleship tells me the Harvesters can heal the damage to your brain. It would require a lengthy withdrawal prior to the operation, which we cannot afford right now, but it will be offered if you want it. Inform your men.”
The Colonel reacted with the same nod he would have given conversation about the weather. He then turned on his heel and headed for the airlock to the rest of the ship, re-affixing his helmet in the process.
The Whaleship indeed had told Dr. Barnard many things. Foremost among them was that all Whaleships were connected with a form of instantaneous communication; the same two-way teleportation gateways that allowed the plasma cannons and disjointed blood supplies could be found in every Whaleship brain. It was not a hive mind, per se, but at this point, every ship not currently in transit between stars was aware that one of their own had once again become enslaved. The nearest one was perhaps a hundred light years away, if the Whaleship brain was to be believed.
With help from the Greenflies and Harvesters, Mars could be terraformed in decades, not centuries. They could create a new living world, and the Whaleship could populate it with a wildly diverse ecosystem of plants and animals from across millions of years and thousands of star systems. Still, they had only a hundred years to build a population capable of resisting the next Whaleship; a Whaleship that could easily hire away all of the Greenflies currently in their employ. A hundred years to go from a few thousand survivors to an army.
Barnard shifted his gaze from the Earth to the starscape beyond it.
No, he thought, we can no longer be a target. Our future lies on one of the living worlds out there. Someday, we can become strong enough to take them all back from their caretakers to allow them to achieve their potential. Intelligent life is not a weed, although, mark my words, we are going to spread like one.
Greenflies Page 35