The Seeds of War Trilogy

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Colby immediately said yes, slipping back into general-mode before remembering he was no longer on active duty and really had no “need to know,” as the military termed it. Still, if the colonel was willing to brief him, he would sure as shit listen. Manny Sif was a heck of a Marine, but he was still just a lieutenant colonel, and this was some pretty heady stuff going on. If Colby could give him any advice based on his years of service, then he owed it to the younger Marine.

  “I sent off a cargo pod with what I could scrape up of the different plant soldiers to Lanie Wasserman right after the battle. Lanie is a research fellow at GSI. We were classmates at Command and Staff.”

  “A civilian?” Colby asked, surprised.

  “I had to do something quickly. The plant material was disintegrating as we collected it. We froze some and vac-packed the rest.

  “GSI is contracted to the Second Ministry, and Lanie’s got clearance. But I routed it through an Academy classmate who’s in MCRDD, and he sent it on, cc’ing the chief of staff.”

  Colby nodded. Yes, that would work. With Manny Sif’s chain of command wiped out by the plant soldiers, he couldn’t send it up the chain, and the Marine Corps Research and Development Division would be a logical alternate destination. Keeping Lieutenant General Godfrey, the current chief of staff, in the loop covered Manny’s ass while getting the samples into someone’s hands. They wouldn’t stay within the military’s control forever, but with Greenstein and his shenanigans, Colby was glad the samples were in military hands for now and not in the civilian side of the ministry.

  “Get this, sir. We’ve already got the initial results. Whatever those plants were, they did not have terrestrial DNA. They are alien.”

  Which was no surprise to Colby. He’d fought the damned things, he’d been one of the damned things. He knew whatever primordial ooze had spawned them had not originated on Earth.

  “Interesting, but why do I get the idea that this isn’t the main thing you want to tell me?”

  “Because it isn’t, sir,” the colonel said, looking around at the Marines accompanying them. “We do have a DNA match. Well, not a complete match, but type-match, is what the message said. The DNA is from the Alpha-Nine class of lifeforms.

  From the way Manny Siff had said “Alpha-Nine,” it was clear the colonel expected him to recognize the designation. If his implant hadn’t been offline, Colby would have run a simple search. Instead he had to dredge his memory. He had a vague recollection from some report that had crossed his desk decades earlier.

  Alien life had been found throughout human space, something like 43 different types. Most were various types of microorganisms, but a good 15 or so were multicellular. Colby was a Marine, though, and not a xenobiologist, and while he remembered enough to recognize what the colonel was talking about, the specifics were lost to him.

  “I’m sorry, Manny, but I’m not up on alien life. What is significant about the Alpha-Nine class?”

  “That’s what was originally on your planet. I mean your new planet. Vasquez!”

  His hair stood on end for a moment, and he wasn’t sure why. He’d known that there had been alien life on Vasquez before it had been terraformed, and it still existed in parts of the planet where humans had not yet tilled the soil for terrestrial crops.

  Were the plant soldiers native to Vasquez? he wondered. No, Vasquez had been cultivated for nigh on 40 years. We would have seen giant broccoli soldiers before now.

  “Anywhere else?” he asked. “Aren’t there some classes that are found on multiple worlds?”

  “That’s the thing, sir,” the colonel said, lowering his voice even more. “It’s the same class as on fourteen known planets.”

  “And let me guess, all in the Eidleman Quadrant?”

  “Yes, sir. All in the Eidleman Quadrant.”

  Vasquez was on the outskirts of human space, pushing outward in the Orion Arm. Most of the human diaspora was inwards, toward the galactic center where more densely packed solar systems offered a greater chance of finding Goldilocks planets to settle or terraform. But that didn’t mean space beyond Vasquez was empty. With over a billion stars in the Orion Arm, there were still hundreds of millions of stars out beyond his adopted home, hundreds of millions of stars that could harbor an untold multitude of lifeforms.

  Something tickled the back of his mind, almost like the touch of his implant when he was taking control of the plant soldiers. A need to expand, to find a new. . . garden? What if the boss plant wasn’t an invader, but a defender? Hell, what if its troops weren’t actually soldiers? He’d spent most of his life in the military, so it only made sense that he’d interpret the situation from that perspective. But he’d been a farmer these last years, and from that point of view the boss plant wasn’t an adversary, it was just. . . a gardener! Panic started to bubble up, and he physically shook his head to clear it, pushing uncomfortable thoughts deep to where they couldn’t surface.

  “. . . Sixth Ministry has already gotten wind of it and are demanding access,” Manny was going on.

  Colby focused on the here and now.

  “Sixth Ministry? They’re the science arm of the government, so that makes sense,” he said, acting like he’d heard everything the colonel had just said.

  And they don’t have the power to do much else, he thought, still concerned about his own future.

  The huge organism that was the government would be shifting to take over the situation. An alien invasion had been the fodder of the media since the 20th Century, and every agency had to have contingency plans ready for this. It wasn’t up to Colby to play hero anymore, so his thoughts went to self-preservation. And as he’d learned when he fought corruption before, that might be difficult to attain. With the military under the control of the First Ministry, there wasn’t much even the commandant could do if the first minister wanted his scalp.

  ***************

  Lieutenant Colonel Sifuentes handed Colby a readout. He gave it a quick read, then crumbled it up and tossed it to a trash can, bouncing it off the rim and to the floor of the Marine’s CP.

  “He won’t quit, will he?” Colby said in disgust.

  It had been a copy of yet another message to the first minister, demanding that Colby, Manny, and all the Marines on New Mars be arrested for traitorous actions against the Republic. Clearly, Greenstein was in panic mode.

  Was he even aware of how ridiculous he sounded? Did he seriously expect that anyone would authorize the arrest of 300-plus Marines? And not just any Marines, but the very same Marines whom he’d already lauded for turning back the plant-soldiers attack. But the man was a politician, first and foremost. He didn’t have to make sense. The rest of the Marines were just bargaining chips in a larger game. Greenstein wanted his ass, and now probably Manny Sif’s as well. He likely thought that if he could yell loud enough and long enough, it was possible that the commandant would concede, just to shut him up, and in the process give up the two of them.

  “You know, you didn’t have to make a target of yourself. You didn’t have to take action on my part, Manny.”

  The younger Marine looked up at Colby, and his eyes hardened for a moment. “With all due respect, General, I am rather insulted that you would even voice something like that. You’re a Marine, an honorable man despite what happened, and Greenstein is scum. There was no other choice, sir.”

  Dutifully chastised, Colby nodded. He’d been wrong. Manny had acted on his honor.

  Still, he was very grateful for it.

  “OK, then,” he said, anxious to change the subject, “where do we stand with the power grid? Is there anything I can do to help there?

  “Not unless you have a G-39 in your backpack, General. Until we get the Corps of Engineers in here, I’m afraid that power is going to be—” he started before he went glassy-eyed in the manner of a person getting messages over his implant.

  Colby automatically queried his before remembering he was cut offline.

  The colonel listened for
a full minute before he snapped back and shouted out, “Sergeant N’belle, get the major over here ASAP and put the battalion on Deployment Alert Bravo.”

  He got to his feet, and Colby asked, “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

  “Oh, of course, sorry, sir. That was the commandant herself. It seems as if she and the Chief of Naval Operations took notice of our reports, and they’re not waiting for the first minister or the director to get off their collective asses.

  “The RS Pattani, a corvette, and a packet destroyer have just entered New Mars orbit. Our orders are to lead a mission back to Vasquez, retrieve any survivors, and assess the situation. If there are still enemy there, we’re to engage them. But our prime mission is to keep any more of them from getting to New Mars. Up to and including, if necessary, destroying the wormhole from the Vasquez side.”

  Colby felt the familiar surge that accompanied the call to battle, and jumped to his feet, anxious to return to action. It took a conscious effort to calm back down. This wasn’t his fight anymore.

  “And Greenstein?” he asked. “Are they coming to arrest him?”

  “Greenstein? No, unfortunately. The commandant said to treat him with kid gloves for now. Politics, you know.”

  And the commandant still doesn’t know which way the wind is blowing, he thought bitterly.

  Which wasn’t fair. General Piper Nilson bled Marine Corps green. She was from the Basic Officers Class just after Colby’s, and she’d been nothing but professional since then. If she ordered Greenstein to be treated with kid gloves, then she had a good reason for that. Which didn’t mean the asshole wouldn’t eventually get his just desserts somewhere down the line.

  “What Marines are on the ships?” Colby asked. “Are you still in command?”

  The Pattani, as a frigate, had a minimal crew and normally no Marines on board, but between the three ships, they could carry up to a battalion-minus of Marines or a mix of special operation-types. That would probably mean a full bird colonel in charge.

  “Sir?” Manny asked, looking perplexed.

  “Are there other Marines in the task force? And are you still in command?”

  “You didn’t. . . wait one, sir.” He went glassy-eyes again, and Colby could see his throat moving as he sub-vocalized.

  He turned back to Colby a long minute later and said, “Sir, G-8 is. . . well, hacking the block on your implant. The commandant is confident that they’ll get it back online with all its previous functions reactivated. That’s probably going to take a few hours, but the paper pushers will need that long to go through all the protocols anyway.”

  “Protocols? Why?”

  “With all due respect, General, I should think that would be obvious. Your commission is being reactivated. You’re in command.”

  Interlude I: Adjusting for the Impossible

  By the time the destruction ceased, the Gardener had completed the regrowth of a minimal body sufficient to its need. The new form secured its enhanced cranium in a snug space beneath the rubble of what had once been one of the structures so prized by this brand of Meat. There was adequate airflow to bring it information, enough moisture to suit its current requirements. From its dwindling supply of resources it had generated and repurposed data collectors into sentries and scattered them around its location. It was safe, for the moment, or at least as safe as any Gardener enduring such circumstances might manage.

  Reality, such as it was, could no longer be trusted. Although it had never itself indulged, the Gardner possessed knowledge of a variety of potent alkaloids capable of altering one’s brain chemistry. Profound and disturbing hallucinations might be achieved, or, with the right combinations, schisms and even complete breaks from reality were possible.

  It found the concept offensive. Trained in design and empiricism, it struggled even to entertain the thought experiment that reality could be subjective. It was nonsense. One could not design a garden, let alone the landscape of an entire world, without an unwavering appreciation for and understanding of objective reality. One gardened by obtaining a mastery of the interplay of complex but predictable patterns. A garden did not spontaneously reject its nature. Grassland did not transform overnight into forest, mosses did not become ferns, conifers did not choose to change themselves into liverworts. Reality operated by rules, laws that could be deduced and observed. It was vast but fixed.

  Except no one had bothered to inform the Meat, not here on this world of mud and Mech, nor back on the planet that it had intended as its latest garden. The purge agents it had unleashed on this world should have overcome local resistance. This was an established fact. Yet, somehow, they had been destroyed down to the last leaf.

  No matter. The mega seeds it had planted had been hard-coded at a genetic level to possess sufficient response patterns to defeat any assortment of Mech or Meat in the known galaxy. For them to do otherwise was as inconceivable as rain falling upward to fill the sky with clouds. But again, reality, as it appeared to be defined in this place, among these Meat, had proved otherwise.

  No Gardener felt threatened by any configuration of Mech. At worst, they were an inconvenience and short-sighted, hasty. No Gardener feared Meat, even more ephemeral and chaotic. Nuisances, nothing more. And while this Gardener had been surprised by the antithesis of Meat wielding Mech—Meat that had learned to overcome its native gravity well and venture into space, infesting other worlds, other systems, with filth and sprawl and thanatopic entropy—still it had expected to overcome the creatures readily enough.

  The Gardener had not imagined that the same Meat that had obtained a modicum of mastery over Mech would somehow merge with its own much more sophisticated vegetable systems. But this Meat had. This Meat had commandeered its vessel. This Meat had compromised its purge agents. This Meat had even launched its own mega seed and, not content with that gross deed, had used its own paltry consciousness to override the mega-seed’s behavioral programming and subvert the mighty structure to its own heinous purposes.

  Reality should not allow even the possibility of such a synthesis of Meat and Mech and Veg. Had not, in all the time since the primal flash. Until now.

  If reality, as it understood it, no longer held sway, if order had surrendered to chaos in less time than the simplest of seeds might germinate, the empiricism demanded that this Gardner must embrace chaos.

  But only in a very orderly manner, flush with internal consistencies born out by direct observation, repetition, and revision.

  Several rotations of this muddy and underdeveloped world occurred while it grappled with these fundamental changes. During that time the lifeless pieces of its purge agents had broken down beyond the cellular level. This had been part of their reality, to return to the soil, to be carried away upon the air, to circulate in the water upon whatever planet they were unleashed. The trio of shattered hulks constructed on the templates of its mega seeds had similarly begun to decompose. Even the usurped creation of this Meat had begun to give way to the natural process. Entropy will out.

  In this new unreality, pursuing its own version of synthesis was not the answer, would not defeat the blend of processes this Meat had employed. No, the Gardener resolved to maintain its integrity of vision. It would not taint itself. But chaos did require sacrifice. Purity would be lost. It could not stand apart from what this Meat had done, not if it had any hope of restoring reality and then warning its fellow Gardeners. It would have to blend as well, remain itself, separate but no longer apart. Only through thorough empiricism would it find the means to defeat such repugnant chaos. Only by learning from this Meat could it achieve a state where all such knowledge might be stricken from the galaxy.

  It had expanded its ratiocination to its theoretical limits and examined the situation from every angle, every perspective, evaluating each and every known and unknown, selecting from the resulting options and scenarios until it had found one that offered the most promising outcome. And then it had begun allowing its massive brain to decay. Soon
after, the rest of its body began to follow suit. Little time remained to this form.

  The particulate remnants of all its creations, even the recent data-gathering sentries, hung in the air. It required little effort to produce a pollen that altered these bits into the iota of a vast network. As the pollen spread, the network expanded throughout the air in all directions. And as the Gardner itself came apart, it distributed its intellect and sense of self to this network. The near infinite scintilla of itself, endless, nearly invisible specks of green, smaller than the smallest of spores, in time landed upon and adhered to every surface of Meat and Mech, and continued to spread further, carried by its unwitting hosts.

  In this form, conscious but bodiless, the Gardner would wait, would observe, and when it had gathered the critical data that would yield its success, it would strike.

  And the Meat—despite its mastery of Mech or its recent impertinent synthesis with Veg—being clueless Meat, would succumb, likely without any awareness of how much trouble it had caused or how it had summoned its own eradication.

  Part II: Thorns, Weeds, and Roses

  “Did you think you could hide from me, Edson?” The sneer in Greenstein’s voice grated on Colby’s nerves.

  Colby turned away from Wendi Utica, Manny Sif’s logistics officer, and said, “Excuse me, Captain.”

  The task force had received a warning order to be ready to deploy back to Vasquez, and even with only a single, understrengthed battalion, there were a million moving parts that had to be coordinated.

  Kid gloves, Edson, kid gloves, he repeated the mantra in an attempt to be civil to the vice-minister. He looked up at Greenstein, a half-smile on his face.

  It didn’t work.

  “Captain, where is your commanding officer?” the vice-minister demanded from Utica.