“It looks a little weird,” Travers said. He stepped up beside her, as if they were out for an afternoon stroll. “Have you noticed what’s missing?”
Alice tensed. Had she missed something? What had she missed? Sergeant Radcliffe would have chewed her out - respectfully, given that she’d been his superior officer seven months ago - if she’d missed anything, unless he’d missed it too. She looked around carefully, trying to see what wasn’t there. The plants looked weird - she couldn’t help thinking that they looked like purple water lilies combined with trees and bushes - but she’d been in alien environments before. Nothing seemed out of place ...
“There are no insects,” Travers said. “And that’s a little odd.”
“Oh,” Alice said. “And that means ... what?”
“Well, they could be scared of us tramping through the undergrowth,” Travers said. “Or they might never have evolved on this world, which means that the plants probably use birds to pollinate themselves. Or the insects might have been exterminated by the virus. That would probably have screwed up the local ecology, but something else might have taken their place.”
Alice frowned. The researchers hadn’t been sure, but they’d speculated that the virus might be able to infect animals and insects ... that latter, in particular, providing a dangerous infection vector. It had taken centuries for humans to realise that insects spread disease and even now, with vaccines and nanotechnology, they could still be dangerous outside the civilised world. She dreaded to think what would happen if the virus managed to infect a swarm of mosquitoes. It might infect an entire city before countermeasures could be devised and implemented. And what could they do then?
“I hope the virus did kill the insects,” she said, finally. “That would be proof, of sorts, that there are limits to its powers.”
She pushed the thought out of her head as the team began to approach cultivated lands. The aliens seemed to live in small towns, if the orbital images were to be believed; each town was surrounded by a handful of fields, growing a variety of crops. The aliens themselves worked the fields with surprising efficiency, for a primitive culture, but never seemed to wander too far from their hometown. Alice wasn’t sure if that was proof that the aliens were infected or a sign that they simply hadn’t been watching for long enough to draw proper conclusions. Someone who took a snapshot of her life when she was sleeping might conclude that all she did was sleep ...
“We won’t go any closer,” Sergeant Radcliffe said, as they took up position in a handful of trees near the town. “We’ll watch from here.”
No one complained, not even Travers, as they settled into place and watched the aliens go in and out of the village. Alice studied them through her binoculars, feeling a shiver running through her entire body as she realised - deep in her bones - that the native aliens were truly alien. Their upper bodies were humanoid, in a manner of speaking; their lower bodies, where their legs should have been, looked like giant spiders. They moved their legs so rapidly, even when they were at rest, that it took Alice several minutes to realise that they walked on eight legs. It didn’t look as if they could climb, she thought, but she suspected they could move at terrifying speed. They looked more the military bomb-disposal robots ago than humans.
“Interesting,” Travers mused, quietly. “If there is any sexual dimorphism, I can't see it.”
“They might all be males,” Alice pointed out. She was the only woman in the party - and an alien might not be able to tell the difference between her and the men. God knew male and female Tadpoles looked practically identical. They could tell the difference, but a human would need to carry out an autopsy to be sure. “The females could be kept inside the town.”
“It’s possible,” Travers agreed. “But farming societies generally needed to put everyone to work. Women were needed to tend the fields too, even if they were often allocated different work or put on reduced duty when they were pregnant. Here ... I can’t see any difference between the sexes. And that means there’s something very different about their society.”
“They’re aliens,” Sergeant Radcliffe said, bluntly. “Are they infected?”
Travers shrugged. “I can’t tell,” he admitted. “Can you?”
Alice said nothing as the wind shifted, blowing an unpleasant scent towards them. She shuddered, remembering tours of duty in the security zone. She honestly couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to live in squalor - or shit - but the locals had seemed used to it. The smarter ones had even started to convert manure into methane, which they used to generate electric power. The aliens she saw in the distance hadn’t even gotten that far.
It isn’t as if anyone came down from the stars and told them what to do, she thought, morbidly. The virus may or may not have infected them, but it certainly wasn’t interested in showing them a better way to live.
Another shiver ran down her spine as she studied the aliens. They didn’t seem to show any interest in expansion, even though there was plenty of cultivatable land only a mile or two from their village. They didn’t even seem to show any interest in war. The more she looked at their village, the more she realised it was completely open to attack. They hadn’t even built a stockade to give the town - and their women and children - minimal protection. She cursed under her breath as she realised the truth. The town was infected. Whatever the natives had been, once upon a time, they weren’t any longer. Her skin crawled. She was looking at an entire population that had been infected by the virus.
“They’re infected,” she said, quietly. “And we have to be very careful.”
Travers glanced at her. “How can you be sure?”
“They’re not trying to expand - or do anything, beyond bare survival,” Alice said. “And that means they have to be infected.”
Travers looked doubtful, but Sergeant Radcliffe nodded in agreement. There was no such thing as a pacifist race, particularly one that had barely learnt to work iron. Every race humanity had encountered was perfectly capable of fighting, even when it had learnt the benefits of cooperation. A race that was incapable of defending itself - against animals, against its own kind, against hostile aliens - wouldn’t last long enough to make an impact on the galaxy. Evolution would ensure that it was replaced by something more capable of looking after itself.
And they don’t seem to have any pressure to expand, Alice thought, remembering the history lessons she’d taken in school. Population pressure - and demographics - had provoked plenty of wars throughout human history. They’re not only stable, they’re stagnant.
“So,” Travers said. “What do we do now?”
“We establish a camp some distance from the town and keep them under observation, while planning our next move,” Sergeant Radcliffe said, firmly. “Unless you have any other ideas ...”
Travers looked up at him. “Can we get into the village?”
Alice felt her lips twist into a sardonic smile. “Do you want to get infected?”
She resisted the urge to giggle at his crestfallen expression. Stellar Star had faced an enemy - a horde of cyborgs - that had ignored the humans until they posed a threat. Or, if Stellar Star XVI was to believed, when they caught sight of Stellar Star’s chest. The virus, she suspected, would definitely notice if a human walked into the village - if nothing else, the intruder wouldn’t smell right - and take steps. Violent steps. Travers had forgotten where he was, she thought. If the aliens saw him, they’d infect him. And then the virus would know precisely where to find the remaining humans.
“No,” Travers said, finally. “But if the virus has them - if they’ve been effectively reduced to nothing more than bodies for the virus - what we learn from their village might be ... ah, it might be their only impact on the universe. We can ...”
“We can worry about preserving something of their culture later,” Sergeant Radcliffe said, firmly. “Right now, we have other problems.”
He detailed two of the marines to keep the village under watch, then led the
remainder of the party back into the woods. Alice noted, as they walked under the trees, that something else was missing. She’d hunted for mushrooms as a young girl, under strict orders to make sure her grandparents checked her finds before she tried to cook and eat them, but there were no alien children searching the woods for anything comparable. That was definitely odd, particularly in a low-tech society. A single bad winter could ruin them. They needed to look for every food source they could.
And we know the plants are edible, at least for us, she thought. Surely, the aliens can eat them too.
She puzzled over it as they headed further into the forest, finally coming to a halt near a hidden cave. Sergeant Radcliffe checked it out, shining his light into every corner, then decided it would make a suitable hiding place. Alice followed him into the cave, keeping a wary eye out for animal droppings or any other signs that the cave was the lair of something dangerous. The old hands had talked about setting up home in a cave, only to discover - too late - that it was inhabited by a family of bears. Alice wasn’t sure she believed the story - careless marine recruits rarely passed basic training, let alone went on active service - but she’d taken the lesson to heart. There were dangers that had nothing to do with the enemy, yet could still get someone killed. It was something to bear in mind.
“We need to take one of the aliens alive,” Sergeant Radcliffe said, once they were settled. “And check to see if he is truly infected.”
Travers looked stunned. “But they’ll notice he’s gone, won’t they?”
“Perhaps,” Alice said. The virus didn’t seem to give much of a damn about its hosts. It might notice that an infected body had gone missing or it might not. And if it did notice, it might not care. “There is a certain element of risk.”
Corporal Hammersmith smirked. “Now I'm afraid that there's going to have to be a certain amount of ... violence,” he quoted, sweetly. “But at least we know it's all in a good cause, don’t we?”
“Remind me to beast whoever introduced you to old comedy classics,” Sergeant Radcliffe said. He took his datapad off his belt and sketched out a quick map of the town and surrounding area. “We’ll keep an eye on them for the next two days and watch for an opportunity to catch one of them alone. Ideally, we want someone quite some distance from the town itself, but it looks as if that isn’t going to happen.”
Alice nodded. She hadn’t seen an alien go further than a mile from the town, even though some of the primitive villages she’d seen on Earth had been so poorly located that their inhabitants had to walk for miles to collect fresh water. A handful of schemes ran through her head to find a way to force the aliens to change their habits, but none of them seemed particularly workable. The virus might take steps to protect its hosts or it might not. It wouldn’t see their loss as anything more than losing a skin cell, perhaps even less. Alice was still surprised it hadn’t introduced modern technology. Surely, the viral clusters within the alien hosts would find it more comfortable to live in a technological environment.
If we needed proof the virus has an alien mentality, she thought, we don’t need to look any further.
“And then we grab the alien and bring him here,” Hammersmith said. He rubbed his hands together. “And then you guys” - he looked at Travers - “get to go to work.”
“Yeah,” Travers said. He didn’t sound happy. “We’ll be experimenting on a POW.”
“The virus isn’t likely to care,” Alice said, although she understood his concerns. “And we are fairly sure they are infected.”
She smiled, as reassuringly as she could. The xenospecialists took more care of their alien prisoners than the military or the police took of human prisoners. But then, quite apart from the risk of accidentally killing the prisoner, there was always the political dimension. Humans would not be pleased if they discovered that an alien race had dissected a human prisoner. Why would anyone expect an alien race to be any different?
“But we don’t have solid proof,” Travers countered. “What if we’re wrong?”
Alice felt a hot flash of impatience. If they were wrong ... well, the nasty part of her mind pointed out that the natives weren’t going to start an interstellar war over the matter. How could they? They had nothing more advanced than iron spears ... assuming, of course, they had any weapons at all. She found it hard to believe that they could enter an alliance with the virus. But without it, there was no way they could do more than wipe out the landing party. They couldn’t take the war into space.
“Then we’re wrong,” she said. “But all the evidence suggests we’re right.”
“We’ll be keeping an eye on them for a while,” Sergeant Radcliffe said. “If we’re wrong, we’ll find out about it well before we commit ourselves.”
“Really?” Travers snorted. “I hope you’re right. Really I do.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Well,” Corporal Hammersmith muttered. “Here they come.”
Alice nodded, stiffly. Four days of careful surveillance had revealed that the only time that any of the aliens was more than a mile from the town was when they sent out small hunting parties, each one armed with bows, arrows and slingshots. They killed a handful of birds and small woodland animals, then carried them back to the town where - presumably - they were eaten. Alice was surprised they didn’t hunt more - in human societies, hunters were often regarded as a cut above farmers - but perhaps the virus simply didn’t care. It was, she supposed, another piece of proof that the town was about as real as a Potemkin Village. Its inhabitants merely mimicked life as intelligent beings.
And the virus drifts around them, she thought. The mask felt uncomfortable in the heat, but she knew better than to risk taking it off. Breathing in active viral particles would be fatal. We have to be very careful.
She watched the aliens walking closer and braced herself. They hadn’t been able to learn that much about the alien biology from indirect observation - their society seemed designed to frustrate observers - but they had learnt that the aliens were strong. Alice wasn't entirely surprised - she knew she was a weakling compared to a Roman legionary - yet it added another complication to the operation. The alien weapons weren't a threat to a marine in full armour - even light body armour would stop an arrow - but grabbing one of the aliens and hauling him home might be difficult. And they had to render the other two aliens comatose for a while.
“They’re nearly within range,” Hammersmith muttered. “Go or no go?”
Alice lifted her stun rifle and took aim. “Mark your man,” she muttered back, wondering - not for the first time - if she was about to shoot a male, a female or some weird and wonderful alien gender that had never registered on humanity’s radar. “Target by the numbers.”
“Aye, Captain,” Corporal Clive Tartar said.
At least he still thinks I’m a captain, Alice thought. Technically, she still held the rank; practically, at least until she was cleared to return permanently to active service, she had no legal right to give orders. Sergeant Radcliffe had taken a risk when he’d put her in command of the snatch-grab-and-run party, even though the plan had been her idea. His head will be on the chopping block right next to mine if we fuck this up.
She smiled, despite herself, as the aliens came closer. The odds of them surviving long enough to be put in front of a court martial board, if they fucked up, were so low that she suspected that even Hammersmith, a brilliant gambler, would have found them impossible to calculate. They could be killed on the spot, they could be chased back to the shuttle, they could be blown out of the sky as they tried to take off ... too much could go badly wrong for her to be sanguine about their chances of success. But they had to know what was happening on Alien-3. She was damned if she was letting this chance pass because she was nervous about making a terrible mistake.
“Fire,” she ordered.
The stun gun went click in her hands, firing a taser bullet towards its target. Alice saw the alien jerk in surprise - being hit by a taser bullet h
urt, even though they rarely did real damage - a second before the electric pulse triggered, sending the alien falling to the ground in a twitching heap. Alice winced in sympathy, then ran forward. The taser bullet was designed to render a human immobile, at least until the charge ran out, but they’d had to make some guesses about what would be effective on the aliens. She stopped and peered down at her alien, noting that its legs seemed to be trying to wave in all directions, and then hastily secured the alien with duct tape. Up close, she scented something familiar about the alien, something that nagged at the back of her mind. Some instinct warned her never to touch the alien with her bare hands.
“Mine’s dead, I think,” Tartar said. He prodded the alien carefully. “I’m not sure why.”
“Take mine back to camp,” Alice ordered. They hadn’t seen any aliens checking up on the hunting party, but that might change when the town realised the hunters hadn’t come home by nightfall. “I’ll take a look at yours.”
She bent over the alien and examined the body quickly. It definitely looked dead, although she wasn’t entirely sure. The taser bullet had lodged in its neck, suggesting that the shock had done something to the alien’s brain. She suspected that they’d need an autopsy to find out and she doubted they had the time. Shaking her head, she picked up the body and carried it into the woods. Depending on what happened, they’d either come back to recover the body or leave it to rot.
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