Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel

by Gregory Benford

  Still, as they advanced carefully into the meadow, her psyche broke out the metaphoric champagne. “Let’s move forward, show ourselves,” she said to the team.

  This plain had rolled out a carpet of many colors. Saffron dust eased up from a cluster of ground-hugging plants—spreading pollen? Russet low ferns, golden greens, and then something crunched beneath their boots and she glanced down at eggshell blue sand.

  Still no sign of a greeting party. Hollow calls and answering long hoots came. Animals, maybe birds conversing, like two beat-up tenor saxophones, exchanging riffs. Songs swept by on the stirring wind.

  Silence in the face of strange nature was even more necessary. She cut her verbal feed down to Cliff, then said nothing. She had never been uncomfortable with silence. In its most welcome form, between lovers, it was an extension of conversation.

  Something in the distance caught her eye. She close-upped it so the display spread before her left eye. New world, new phyla. She wanted to do what every field biologist yearned for: name a new species. Somehow, in all the ferment on the Bowl, she had neglected to do that. But the odd, wriggling-and-shifting sky shape suggested no way to attach her name to it. Beth Marble is a plain, boring ground for naming such an oddity. Zingo, she decided to call it.

  It seemed like a living spiderweb, somehow. Strands wove around in the image, black glistening lines. It slowly got larger. Not a vehicle or any birdlike shape, it wriggled like a caterpillar fitted with oars. Chunky. A machine?

  To her left she saw a glimmering pond, its sheen rippling in the light wind. Maybe take a swim in it? Her skin itched. Maybe later, if—“Let’s shuck these suits,” she said. “Take our whole-body chances with the air.”

  They knew the subtle interplay of viruses, microbes, and metazoa made an ecological web of staggering complexity. But somehow it fit well with Earth biochem. And this atmosphere differed in small ways from Earth, with a tad more oxy and less nitrogen, with some interesting xenon thrown in. So the Artilects had whipped up a general vaccine to counter some anticipated troubles. Maybe allergies might develop, but the only way to know was—do it.

  She shed her suit. Beneath it was durable trail garb, and she quickly secured her backpack, water, tool belt. The team had drilled this and were done within three minutes. She glanced at the distant zingo. Bigger, flexing. She pointed it out to the team. “Track that.”

  A thing buzzed by her head. She ducked and saw as it zoomed away that it had four wings, about the size of a sparrow. Maybe it played the role of dragonflies in freshwater wetlands? she guessed. Convergent adaptation. Willowlike trees hugged the pond shore, but much taller and with twisted, helical trunks. Everything in a 0.1 grav field would be taller, the Artilects thought. After all, redwoods had grown to two hundred meters in Mars’s 0.38 grav. Convergent evolution seemed to have led to pollinator plants, too, she saw, in the budding flowers of the meadow—bigger stamens and longer, twisted pistils, but the same strategy, seemingly. Still, some of the plants were bizarre to her biologist’s eye, with dark brown canopies pitched toward the star, tracking it. There were bunched leaves like parabolas, mossy towers like abstract termite mounds, and some best consigned to whatever.

  Then she sensed things coming fast—yelping, flitting through the nearby foliage. But mostly the many forms came through the air—a sidewise flock of fluttering, fluting life. A jumping ratty thing streaked by, using Beth’s head as a touch-point, its wing sets moving at right angles to each other—then gone. She flinched but managed not to cry out.

  Then they all heard a long bass note sound through the moist air. The horizontal living flight trembled, squawked, yelped—hurried. Something was scaring them, sending low, booming frequency waves ahead.

  “Get down, cover up,” Beth said.

  She glanced back at their lander, now hundreds of meters away. No time to get back into it.

  The deep, rolling note was louder. She checked the zingo, but it was not much bigger. It seemed to hover, flexing and curling. Then she saw the horrors above the tree line, coming on fast.

  Snarling, flexing bodies, flappy wings, and several arms. Big heads, shrieking. Heads at both ends, some of them, but that couldn’t be right, could it? Teeth, long and slanting and flashing yellow in the sunlight. Sunken eyes of red. Seven of them, banking like a flock of reptile birds, accelerating down from distant clouds, skimming above the trees, all faces focused on the human prey. Their bodies twisted, leathery wings slapping together at the top of each stroke like distant handclaps.

  Their booming calls came together, a flying song of malice.

  She saw Campbell running to her right. “Disperse!” she called. The team was already running for shelter among the trees. But not Campbell. His old-style rifle boomed. He had quickly maneuvered, drawing their attention.

  The monsters came in on a V-formation. Their huge heads focused forward, several appendages lowered. Claws? The multijointed arms looked stubby at the end. One dipped toward Bemor Prime.

  The spidow had trouble hiding, but no trouble moving. His five limbs gripped hard in the alien weeds while he fought with his mouth. It was not much changed from a Bowl spidow’s: vertical fangs, five eyes. Its assailant … yes, faces at both ends, fangs lashing alternately at Bemor. One end had to be an anus, but it had eyes, four beady eyes each forming squares at each end.

  The three belt marines had kept their places and were firing. Beth came to herself. The team was responding well. She looked for targets. Got off a bolt.

  At Campbell’s first shot, the remaining enemy wheeled toward him. He fired rapidly and one of the snaky, winged bodies veered out of formation—straight toward Beth. She ducked and ran beneath the thumping of wings.

  More short, sharp shots from Campbell. He was aiming above her. She looked up into a ceiling of wrinkled leather. She could see the nearest beast was wounded. Green blood sprayed from its side.

  She felt the wings waft by her head, stirring her hair.

  The wounded thing bellowed and from the yawning mouth, big as a lion’s, came a scream of throaty rage. At the same moment, heat brushed by her. It singed her nostrils, roasting them painfully. As the beast flapped by, trying to stay aloft, she saw a darting yellow stream of hissing fire.

  It was venting flame out the ass. Shitting flares of fire. The yellow stream licked the ground and set the meadow aflame. The thing was flailing, its fire jet drawing a scorched line in its path.

  Then the huffing brown mountain struck the ground. It hooted its anger as wide rubbery wings slapped together fruitlessly. It groaned and died.

  She watched, fascinated, as the others flapped hard, getting away. Then came the scream.

  One of the beasts had Campbell at the waist. Its after teeth slashed through his ground suit. He had not taken it off, and now the thing raked through the tough fabric. Campbell’s mouth yawned, agony in his fading voice as the thing beat its wings against him. It stood on articulating feet like pads, not claws. With leverage it snapped its head around, shaking Campbell. He dropped his rifle. Tried to reach for a pistol at his waist. He had his hand engulfed by the mouth—which clamped down. His eyes rolled up and his voice trickled away. The creature’s mouth opened and crunched down on his hand. Blood spurted from his arm, and the hand fell to the ground. The thing snapped its whole body again, shaking Campbell like a rag doll.

  Beth stood frozen. She heard a zipping pop. Cliff crouched beside her. He aimed his cutting laser at the beast and popped off another shot at its head. The thing flinched, as if irritated.

  Others of the team were firing their cutters. Ashley Trust and Viviane were crouching to aim. The beast looked around, its nasty red eyes jerking from one human to the next. Its fellows were wheeling overhead, as if undecided. One of them had slammed to the ground. It lay bleeding out, its several arms and wings thrashing in vain against the meadow. Burning grasses around it boiled black smoke up into the sky.

  The one holding Campbell in its mouth began staggering forward. Its th
ree padded appendages smacked down. It gained a bit of speed. It hopped, flapped—and lofted up, laboring into the sky.

  Laser pulses played along its side. It ignored that. Campbell’s body shifted in the big mouth. The beast tilted the body over. Campbell hung, impaled by the long teeth, head and feet down.

  The flock flapped away, multiple wings whirring, aft eyes watching.

  Beth turned, counting her team. Only Campbell was missing. The others looked at her, eyes wide with shock.

  “Secure perimeter!” she called. “In those trees.” She pointed to the nearest grove of the helical trunks. The team all ran in long, loping strides. Finger snakes rode human friends. Bemor Prime was ahead of them all. Within a few seconds, they were under the shade of rustling fronds. An odd silence descended.

  “Turn outward, check any movement toward us,” she said.

  Beth turned to watch outward herself and made a squishy step forward. She looked down. Somewhere back there, she had pissed her boots full.

  FOURTEEN

  SETTLING IN

  Still no reception party.

  The forest was quiet, basking in sunlight.

  Redwing sent from the ship that the Glorians’ voice had gone silent. The team set to swearing, burning off their fear and anger, moving around the trees, peering out.

  So she set them to forming a camp. Time to eat, anyway. That made them stop whispering about Campbell, hatching plans to go get his body, and similar nonsense. Busy hands quiet buzzing minds. Plus, she wanted to look over the carcass of the downed monster.

  She had not done any field biology in a long time, so taking out her laser cutter and field knife was enjoyable. She and Cliff and Ashley managed to haul the beast into the shade. “So much mass,” Cliff said, “and it can fly. Benefit of a tenth grav.”

  So it seemed. They sliced open the chest to find a huge heart and arteries, with odd green blood seeping through dense muscles. Plausible, to pump oxygen-rich weird blood to muscles during strenuous work. The thing they decided to call a skysnake had a birdlike hollow, honeycomb structure of bones to ensure lightness of frame. Campbell had hit it with a shot to the belly. Two laser bolts had hit the head, and now the fearsome face was split open like an overripe fig, oozing green goo.

  Ashley seemed to like the work, though he was mostly a ship-systems guy. He tapped in a tightbeam comm with SunSeeker’s Bio Artilect as Beth and Cliff carved up the body. Soon enough, Cliff slid body samples into the compact bioreader.

  The flamethrower interested Beth most. Some diagnostic swipes from the creature’s top dome came back from the Artilects: phosphine. “A hydrogen-phosphorus combo,” Ashley said. “Lessee … these are dust, see?—from a rock. Stable under air pressure like this, the Artilects say. But under pressure, it ignites.”

  Cliff said, “Good and simple for this skysnake. It just squeezes, maybe adds a touch of hydrogen from the dome—bang, flame.” He considered the sagging dome. “Hey, let’s ditch that name. Call it a dragon.”

  Ashley shrugged. “Sure. It farts fire out its end, so maybe backfire dragon?” He made a staccato laugh, more like a bark. He glanced at his helmet data feed from the Artilects. “So, they say, when phosphine gets out into a quick pressure drop, it burns in oxygen. Doesn’t need a spark to go. My feed says there’s a colored stone that stores the stuff, called apatite.”

  Beth sniffed, nose wrinkled. “Well, apatite rates negative for my appetite. Smells awful. Like rotting fish mixed with garlic. Ugh.”

  Cliff laughed, a soothing rumble. “So a backfire dragon eats the stones? Raw? Ships it along to its stomach. Reacts with acid, farts gaseous phosphine. Meets oxy, goes boom.”

  Ashley pointed to the beast’s tail. “Says phosphine is highly toxic. So backfire dragons have some inbuilt resistance to the toxic effects. Look, we’re inside a building here. Designed. So maybe these things are, too.”

  Beth snorted. “Basic bio: Orgel’s rule. Evolution is smarter than you are. But it takes its time. Corollary: Most people who say that this or that could not evolve are simply showing a lack of imagination.”

  Ashley shrugged. “Okay, they’re the local killer, predator gang. What’ll we do about it?”

  Cliff pointed back to their lander. “Get better weapons.”

  “And stand watches,” Beth added.

  * * *

  Beth surveyed their perimeter, head aswirl with alarms.

  She made herself relax. In the field, nervous eyes missed subtle signs. So, following on long experience, she soothed herself with a memory: Back on SunSeeker. Cliff offering her a fog sphere, conjured from his wrist stash. So she punctured the bubble with her teeth and inhaled senso mist. She needed it. Ooooh … Then lovemaking in the spherical pool. Less than a day ago. Forever far away now.

  She warily watched their perimeter.

  Everything knew they were here. They moved forward through the odd helical trees, in a sphere of slow quiet. The sun slanting through the Cobweb flushed pale streaks of light through the softly rattling leaves. The sunlight came in through decks far away, filtered by drifting oddments of land and liquid. She could see, far away, sloping bubbles with watery colors dancing like wobbly clouds. A deeper run of color washed through the forest, like blood seeping in, then flaring into steel blue like luminous knife blades. This place gave a flickering spectrum that drained through the sky. Not like a planet, no. They would face weird weather, she was sure.

  “Let’s get kinetic,” Cliff said from five meters away. “Use skipping.”

  “Okay.” She had dispersed the team, so they did not represent a compact target for … well, whatever predator might appear. As a field biologist, she knew predator density was small, but in a 0.1-grav space, smells and signals could travel far, and predators descend quickly.

  She had also not let them load up on lunch. Hunger kept her sharp, and them, too. An evolutionary legacy. Hungry, you figure out a smarter way to bring down the next woolly mammoth—today, not tomorrow.

  “Use skips if you have a clear trajectory,” she sent. “Don’t get tangled in trees! Jump them if you can.”

  The team gave a cheer and began taking long arcs, legs stretched ready, to pick up speed.

  Beth looked back toward their landing area. She used a small helmet-projecting image to keep track of what the craft was doing. The swarms of launched buzz-overs had already spread into an area of survey kilometers wide. No further sign of the backfire dragons. Data came streaming in, relayed to SunSeeker. Good. She had reported the attack, sent videos, and Redwing had simply said, “Keep on.” Good to have local control, at least.

  The star was in a slow-motion sunset, a cherry ovoid blur as it neared the horizon at the edge of the web, two hands above it. Was she just jumpy, or did that glow above the woody rim sit squat and pulsing and malevolent, eyeing them?

  Near it hung the zingo—or was it the same? The shape was much different now. Was it a device or a creature? She viewed it close up and still could not estimate how far away it was, because the shifting lines changed, without giving a clear idea of what the hell they were. She shrugged, turned to check her team—and an idea came.

  The Glorians had opened their high atmospheric film, guided their craft to this spot. An open meadow. Only a hill a few kilometers away broke up their view: open fields, many kilometers long, bright with flowers and with scattered forest and shrubs along meandering streams. The hill was a few hundred meters, looked like. Easy slope, some slumping, so a good platform to camp on—yes.

  Colonizing the solar system had taught clear lessons about what humans liked. Stemming from their evolution, which by now the Glorians knew, a simple locale stood out. People were most at rest with three features: A level vantage point on a moderate rise, commanding views of the approaches—great for seeing and fending off enemies and predators—hold the high ground. A vista of parkland, with grasses and copses of green trees. Water nearby and visible, whether stream, pond, lake, or ocean. These held true across all cultures. So
solar colonies echoed that as best they could. Spinning, hollowed-out asteroids, Martian valleys under domes, Lunar vaults kilometers across that tricked the eye into thinking the sky was real—all worked on the unthinking human operating system.

  So: She saw a stream on the hillside, with a shady blue lake at its bottom. Nothing else like it within view. This is where the Glorians figured we’d want to go.

  “Team! Flank right—our goal is that hill.”

  FIFTEEN

  TWISTY

  “Subtle bastards, aren’t they?” Cliff asked sardonically as they pitched camp on a bumpy but level field, commanding the lake view from a hundred meters up. Getting here had been easy. Forested crags they could ascend in leaps. Steep pitches were nothing much.

  “So they let us blunder into a backfire dragon ambush?”

  “Yeah, odd ethics.”

  She watched the team deploy. “Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.”

  “Your motto, yes.” Cliff never stopped watching their perimeter. “Those backfire dragons remind me of Jerry Muskrat. Old buddy, first-year college. Cherokee Indian. He showed us his trick in his totally dark dorm room. He could on command fart and light it, so suddenly the room got bright for an instant. Then again, and again. In three different musical notes. Never seen that since.”

  “So those backfire dragons…”

  “Remind me of college, yeah. Nostalgia.” He frowned. “Team is pretty shaken up.”

  “Looks like.” Now that they were here, she felt uneasy. Okay, they had followed her biologist’s hunch. Could keep watch on the sky and the approaches to the hill.

  So … Where was the damned welcome party? Plus the sun was dropping along the length of the Cobweb. Glory was going to shadow the length of it, bringing a short night. More like an eclipse than a nightfall. Maybe two hours from now.