Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  She turned in a circle, arms outstretched, and spun with abandon in a brazenly naked pirouette. She was a part of the landscape like some slick, wet creature of the jungle itself, awash in the nourishing rain, celebrating its coming.

  He was tempted to strip naked and join her.

  He smiled.

  She must have sensed him watching her because she looked right at him and waved. She turned around and gyrated her hips at him suggestively.

  “You’re nuts!” he said into the window. “You’re crazy!”

  Beautiful and crazy.

  But as he watched the unearthly image twirl and spin, he couldn’t quite get the hair on the back of his neck to go down completely.

  There was another flash, then a long darkness. The next flash saw her standing stock-still, arms beckoning him, fingers waving, her eyes staring, and the image went from beautiful to bizarre again.

  “Come to me, Howard. Come . . . come,” her lips said.

  “No thanks . . . ” he said stiffly and tried to smile at the spooky humor.

  Carla was suddenly jerked out of view like a ragdoll, so violently her body folded backwards as it flew toward the foliage.

  The sound came out of Howard like a grunt, “Hey, goddammit!”

  He watched for a few seconds more, frozen, his heart pounding.

  The silent image of her flying backwards, vanishing into the foliage, burned in his head like an afterimage. One second she was there, a statue of perfect proportions, standing in the driving rain—then nothing.

  He dashed on some clothes, grabbed a light and jammed his hand down on the hatch lock. While the door was swinging down, he took a rifle from the rack and clicked off the safety. He snatched a locator from the rack and put it in his pocket, and then, pushed the switch that turned on the shuttle’s beacon.

  “Carla!” he yelled running down the ramp. “Carla!”

  * * *

  He ran to the spot, shining the floodlight in all directions. He put the light on the spot of jungle that had swallowed her. The bright, white light turned the wall of foliage a pasty green.

  Nothing.

  Water ran in streams off the thick leaves and disappeared into the foliage below. No sign. No blood. Just the pounding rain and the booming thunder.

  “Carla!”

  Something got her. Something big. It’s still in there.

  He stared into the foliage, trying to see something, anything. He turned the rifle’s muzzle toward the jungle at the ready. He wanted to shoot, to kill the jungle itself, but was afraid of further endangering Carla—if she were alive. He crabbed sideways, back and forth, trying to see into the thick tangle of vines and leaves.

  “Carla!”

  He started in.

  The leaves brushed his face and stuck wetly as he worked his way into the tangle. He went in no more than two meters when he saw the blood—a pool of pink in the depression of a broad leaf. The undergrowth was broken and pushed down and forced back as if a bulldozer had moved through. It wouldn’t be hard to follow whatever it was with a track like that.

  “Carla!”

  He picked up his pace, almost at a trot, sweeping the remaining tangle away as he went. The jungle swallowed the light, giving him no more than a few meters visibility ahead and casting moving shadows that confused his eyes, making it difficult to tell phantom branch from real.

  The hole appeared out of nowhere, a giant black mouth angling down into the ground. The suddenness of it bursting out of the green background made him stop cold in his tracks. Three meters in diameter, it gave a fairly good indication of the size of the thing that occupied it. Howard moved closer, letting the light pierce the burrow’s blackness.

  There was Carla’s blood, just a few drops, on the ground at the entrance. He looked closer and found several more a meter or so inside. He could make out strange tracks like clusters of stab holes in the soft soil. He moved in cautiously, holding the light high. The angle was steep and the entrance muddy and slippery. He had to slide part of the way down to a point where the tunnel leveled off.

  The floor was well-packed and worn smooth. He could see more of the tracks in the dirt. Roots protruded from the tunnel walls and ceiling in great numbers like stiff and twisted hair. A narrow and muddy stream of water ran in along the cove of the wall. An odor, sweet and thick, permeated the air and left its scent on the back of his tongue and made him want to spit.

  Standing in the burrow’s muffled quiet, he could hear his pulse pounding in his head. His breathing was shallow and rapid. Insects, attracted to the light, buzzed and banged into it. He turned off the hand light, put the strap over his shoulder, then turned on the rifle’s sight-light. It cast a narrower but adequate beam down the burrow. The compromise would be worth it when it came time to shoot.

  The scent grew stronger as he proceeded, so much so that he had to stop and work up a wad of spit, then with a scowl, silently discharge it onto the burrow’s floor.

  The tunnel bent to the right, and Howard moved tight against the wall. As he inched around the corner, he felt the thin roots drag against his face and neck like stiff, thin fingers.

  Turning the light on the floor, he saw a trail of red drops almost in a straight line. If she were alive, she wasn’t bleeding profusely. He knew the amount of blood on the floor was no indication of her condition. She was most likely hurt very badly.

  He turned another bend, and the light trailed off the brown wall and into space, illuminating a wide spot on a distant wall.

  A chamber.

  He turned the light off, pressed himself against the damp earthen wall and listened.

  The silence and darkness were heavy, and his heart still beat in his ears. He wished he could make the pounding stop so he could better hear. He couldn’t stand the taste in his mouth and leaned out and spat again.

  Then he heard it; a distant but unmistakable sound.

  There are some sounds that cannot be confused with anything else. They are universally recognizable regardless of the source. Masticating and the tearing of meat are some of those sounds.

  He closed his eyes tight against the gruesome noise, trying not to imagine what was happening in that chamber.

  “Carla . . . ”

  He took a deep breath, steeled his spine, turned on the sight light and stepped into the chamber.

  He thought it was part of the chamber at first; the rifle’s light illuminated so little of it. As the light moved across it, he could make out regular bands of hard and shiny material, rolled like thick brown leather.

  He reached for the floodlight and unlooped it from his neck. Then, holding it high and keeping the rifle ready, he turned it on.

  The light flooded the entire chamber with white.

  The creature’s back was humped and armored like an armadillo’s, but there the similarity ended. It took him a moment before he could discern which end was which. The end with the bloody mass under it was the head.

  Her body had been reduced to pulp under that alien maw. It worked what was left of her with relentless violence, pulling off chunks at a time and masticating, the mandibles working sideways with machine-like precision and grinding power. Howard groaned and had the overwhelming urge to turn and run from the horror of it.

  The entire cave was strewn with the remains of other kills; tails, heads, bones and the thing’s own waste. The reek he’d been breathing was coming from this very chamber.

  The creature was huge and powerful. It seemed not to care that there was an alien prey-thing shining a light on it; it just continued to eat.

  He raised the rifle and put the bright spot of light on the creature’s head, right where he believed the brain to be.

  He fired.

  In a blinding flash, the rifle’s blast seemed to tear a hole in the very air of the chamber. He hadn’t fired a fifty-five-caliber rifle since the service. He’d forgotten how devastating a ball of lead alloy, moving at 4100 feet per second, could be. Tissue and bone exploded from the creature�
��s flat head as if a grenade had been inside it. The monster slumped to the floor as its short legs collapsed under it.

  Howard’s ears were ringing.

  “Die . . . you bastard.”

  He walked over to it, stepping over the alien body parts and shit. He made himself go to the head. He stood there for a moment; and when he got up the nerve, he looked down.

  Carla’s face was there, her eyes wide open. He looked away. He wondered for one grisly moment if she had mercifully been dead when the thing started to feed. He could only hope—but would never know for certain.

  He wanted to pick her up and carry her home, but there wasn’t much to carry except her head.

  He howled with rage.

  * * *

  He awoke late in the morning from a brief and shallow sleep. A puzzling sense of dread and loss clouded his mind and persisted for a while before he remembered it was Carla’s death that caused it. Then images of the night’s events came back one at a time like waking nightmares; disjointed, ugly and random. He looked over at her empty, unmade bunk and the sight of it filled him with blackness.

  Carla was gone.

  This had been their home; a metal and composite-bound space, filled with equipment, tools and their few personal possessions. She’d tried to make it a real home when the desire to nest struck some feminine chord in her. She had fashioned odd curtains for the shuttle’s bare ports on one occasion, and, on another, had placed her mother’s antique quilts on the bunks. The quilts were still there somewhere.

  He sat on the edge of the bunk for what seemed like hours, his head in his hands, letting the memories of her come and go, to wrench his guts or make him laugh, then weep, at something she’d done or said long ago.

  When he stepped out into the planet’s wet air, the scent wasn’t as sweet as it had been. It was still overcast, and a light fog in the air muddied the forms around him, turning the splashes of color to mere murky discolorations against the green and black background.

  He hated the planet and everything in it.

  This goddamned swamp killed her, he thought.

  He put about twenty charges in a satchel and walked back to the creature’s burrow, rifle at the ready. There was something to do before he left.

  He’d vacillated, trying to decide whether or not to retrieve her head and give it a proper burial or to leave it in place when he brought the burrow down on itself. He opted for the latter. The thought of carrying her disembodied head was just too much for him, plus he couldn’t think of what to put it in that would be appropriate.

  He placed the charges at the entrance to the feeding chamber, laying them out in a pattern he thought would create the right blast pattern. He didn’t look at her while he did it.

  Safely outside, he stood with the detonator in his hand and lowered his head. He took a deep breath and spoke quickly. He didn’t know exactly what to say, so he just started talking, his voice wooden.

  “Here lies a woman named Carla Verde, my wife. She was a woman who loved me and that I loved in turn and she was strong and kind and she loved her work and was not afraid of many things. She worked hard to bring down her debt and was respected by her colleagues and loved by her family.”

  That was all he could get out. The need to weep pushed aside his artificial resolve like a wave on sand. He fell to his knees, doubled over, and wept.

  “Carla . . . ”

  When he gathered his composure some time later, he cleared his eyes and pointed the detonator in the direction of the burrow.

  “Damned rotten swamp.”

  The blast shook the burrow in a single rumble that knocked him down. The blast belched from the entrance and ripped the leaves from the branches, sending them fluttering to the ground in a confetti shower of green.

  He crawled in the burrow a ways to make sure it had completely caved in. He didn’t think a Demolition Specialist could have done better. He wished the act had given him more satisfaction.

  He walked numbly back to the shuttle.

  Much later, he slept a little more.

  He thought briefly about doing as Carla suggested and sending back fake survey data as a way to protect the planet. It would have been her final wish.

  He had a far better idea.

  What he wanted was to see the planet scraped and dragged and bulldozed and skinned until not one dram of copper or lead remained in its rotten soil. He wanted the burrows of those giant bugs mashed flat and the occupants gassed or irradiated by Bio-Control or crushed by the thousands under the tracks of heavy equipment. He wanted the very climate to change from the defoliation and to see huge sections of the shit ball laid to waste by drought and wind in the years to come. He wanted the ocean to heat and everything in it to die and sink belly up and rot to mud.

  He wanted the whole planet to die.

  He changed the data all right; he made the find look richer and more valuable than it was. He turned it into a bigger plum; a literal gold mine that would excite the ravenous greed of every money-grubbing opportunist in the Commonwealth.

  In short, he hoped and prayed that by the time year 3050 rolled around, the entire planet would be dead; its blood-sucked corpse infested with the absolute worst that Homo sapiens had to offer. He hoped the ball of shit would become some mining “Center of Excellence” where new and exciting ways of stripping and plundering and pillaging mineral wealth would be tested and perfected; where blasting and pulverizing rock would reach the level of art.

  Most of all, he wanted all life on the fetid ball to choke on the fumes of human waste and to see the dead and dried carcasses of everything that ever lived on it blown away on the wind.

  Before he sent the data up to the orbiter, he exercised his prerogative to name the shit hole. By law that right was reserved for those who first landed on it and surveyed it. However, it was considered bad form for someone who lacked real influence to name a planet, even if you had the right by law. Such rights were reserved for executives and other VIP’s to be used as political currency, not as perks for grunts like geologists.

  This time he would make an exception. He didn’t care about the consequences, and it was his right by law, goddamnit.

  He looked at the field labeled “Object Name: WSXPSZ-56” and remembered how Carla had complained about the detached, cryptic and impersonal nature of the default planet names.

  Not this time.

  He pressed the edit key and typed VERDE’S REVENGE.

  2

  He could see the crap at the bottom of the ravine. It was there, and he hated it for that alone. They’d cleared almost thirty square kilometers this week, and the cluster of alien vines at the bottom of this wash was all that was left in the section.

  If a plant could be lucky, this one was. Rooted deep in the ravine and bordered on two sides by steep walls, it was virtually immune from the defoliator’s chopping cables. His instructions had been to clear the section by the sixteenth and that meant clear, not almost clear or nearly clear; and here was this patch of crap right in the way.

  Damn viney shit.

  It was growing right where one of the two-meter tubes would have to go. There was no doubt about it; the stuff was right in the way.

  He put the scope to his eye and looked at it up close. He’d half-expected to see a single trunk, but by shifting the focus forward and back through the tangle, he could make out what he thought were numerous trunks within it. It was a whole grove of whatever-the-hell-it-was. He turned on the scope’s scale and took a measurement. The trunks were thicker than he thought, too; some were a full half-meter in diameter. The leaves and branches were so dark green that they almost looked black.

  He lowered the glasses and sucked in a big nose-full of air. The sickly sweet scent of the chopped-up plant stuff made him snort the air back out.

  The defoliator was made to clear relatively flat, even terrain. A few hills were okay, but not real rough stuff. There was no way to get the defoliator’s cutters down into it; and the planet’s f
lora was so damned wet and mushy that it wouldn’t burn. Incendiaries were out. He cursed the designers for not thinking of a way to root out crap down inside something.

  Sonofabitcheen green shit.

  Someone would have to go down there with a mini and chop the shit out, and it had to be done tomorrow before the first inspection. The crew was small, just himself, Douglas and Brown. Since it took two to operate the big defoliator, it would be him, Hector Villaroos, who’d have to do it. It would be damn dirty, sweaty work.

  Shit.

  He turned away from the ravine and stomped back over to the truck, kicking great clumps of hot, pulverized plant and animal material. The last clump flew up on the windshield and slid down it with a soft hiss. When he got to the truck, he had to whack it off the window with a swipe of his hand. A piece of snake or lizard-thing stuck to his finger, and he flicked that off, too.

  He was still pissed when he got back to the shelter, and Brown picked up on it like a bloodhound.

  “What’s the story, Boss?” Brown asked.

  Brown was a good worker, but there was something about him Villaroos couldn’t quite trust. It might have been the way he managed to be a little too cheerful. Villaroos found little to be cheerful about on this weed-choked planet, and any cheery noise sounded phony to him in the hot, damp air.

  “There’s a big-assed tangle of shit down in the ravine that has to come out.”

  “Did we miss it?”

  “That’s the problem. You can’t even get to it,” Villaroos said with a scowl. “I’ll have to go down and chop the shit out by hand.”

  “Rough,” Brown said.

  “Fucking crap has choked up the whole damn ravine already.”

  “Well, you’ll earn your money tomorrow,” Brown said.