Dominant Species Omnibus Edition

by David Coy

  “If I was sick, I’d stay home,” Lavachek said to him. Lavachek unbuckled his belt and got up to get himself another cup of coffee. The shuttle’s on-board coffee dispenser was one of the few niceties provided by the general contractor.

  Lavachek made two cups and handed one to Habershaw on his way back. It was just part of the job.

  “I’d ‘a made you one, too, Francis,” Lavachek said to Magee, “but I didn’t know how you took it.”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Magee said, regretting the words before they out.

  Habershaw and Lavachek exchanged la-di-da looks. “What kind of coffee do you drink then?” Lavachek wanted to know. “I mean, in the morning.”

  “I drink Coke.”

  “Coke?”

  “Yeah, Coke.”

  “You’re not one of those early morning Coke drinkers are you? You bring one with you?”

  “No.”

  “Want some coffee?” was Lavachek's “quick come-back.” He laughed, and Magee grinned a big goofy grin and shook his head, acting embarrassed. He was supposed to.

  Habershaw dug a vial of antibiotic tabs from his shirt pocket, shook out two of them and downed them with a sip of coffee. Lavachek saw it.

  “Pain killers?”

  “Yep.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Yeah, something like it anyway.”

  Habershaw took another swig of coffee and looked out the window. When he thought Lavachek wasn’t looking, he slipped the vial back into his shirt pocket.

  Several other contract workers climbed on board over the next ten minutes. Habershaw knew them all by sight. They had to step over his outstretched leg, some of them acting weird that they had to do it.

  The pilot chimed the take off signal, and the door slid closed. Without a sound, the craft lifted off and banked to the east. Habershaw’s dozer operation would be the first stop.

  The section was eighty kilometers square; nearly nine kilometers on a side. The shuttle distributed the workers to the work sites and picked them back up at quitting time. The shuttles were the primary source of transportation if you had to travel any distance within the section.

  The terrain on Verde was rugged under the thick carpet of jungle. Ravines, pits, hills and an occasional marsh pond dotted the landscape, making travel by truck or small tractor dicey at best. The ravines were the worst; steep drop-offs choked with vegetation. Some of them were fifty meters deep. The defoliators had done a good job of whacking back the plant life, but the terrain’s coarse characteristics remained—at least for the moment.

  By the time Lavachek and Habershaw disembarked at the east perimeter, the sun was high and hot. Lavachek opened a hatch on the side of the shuttle and yanked out a fifteen-liter bottle of water. Before the day was out, they’d drink all of it.

  The dozer was enormous; nearly thirty meters high and twice again as wide. Shipped and assembled in pieces, it was a major project just to get such a machine to its destination. It had taken Habershaw and Lavachek, using a one-hundred-ton truck-crane and a crew of eight riggers a full thirty days to assemble the components. With a blade wide enough to cut an eight-lane highway in one pass, this machine did the rough cutting, the gross forming, of the terrain. Not just the blade, but also the tracks themselves were tools. Twenty meters wide, the enormous tracks rolled over the terrain and mashed it flat, homogenized it. A skillful Operator could use the tracks almost as effectively as the blade itself to pound and crush and flatten the landscape. At over a quarter-million metric tons in weight, no geographical feature could withstand the power of the machine for long.

  They stepped onto the lift at the rear of the machine, and Lavachek latched the gate. “Gonna be hot,” he said.

  “It’s always hot on this bastard.”

  Lavachek hit the up button with his palm, and the lift started to climb. When they got to the top, they could look over the rear of the machine and see the work they’d done already. By running the dozer backwards and forwards and over and back, they’d turned the irregular surface of this eastern strip of the section from rough to uniformly smoother—not smooth—that was the grader’s job in the next phase, but the hills and ravines in that strip were gone, obliterated by the unstoppable power of the heavy machine.

  “Looks pretty good so far, eh?”

  “Not bad. Those hills are tougher than they seem. Got a lot of clay in ‘em when you get down deep.”

  “They fill in the ravines pretty good though.”

  “You gonna start her up?”

  “I’m gonna take a pee. You’re gonna start her up.”

  “Check.”

  Habershaw started across the catwalk to the toilet. When he got inside and closed the door, it was all he could do to keep from falling over. The energy he’d expended to appear to be in less pain than he really was had taken its toll. He’d waited as long as he could; there was no way he could get through the day without them. He’d have to live with the side effects, but he had to have the pain killers. He took out another bottle from his other pocket, opened it and popped two tablets down, swallowing them dry. He pulled down his cottons and twisted around until he could see the parasite, at least part of it. He wasn’t sure, but it looked bigger, swollen maybe. The area around the bug was red, inflamed and tender. He touched it, just barely, and the touch sent a flash of burning pain up his leg. “You mother fucker . . . ” he muttered.

  As he was limping toward the Operator’s cab, he heard and felt the massive motors coming to life, each one sending the low bass note of energy they generated a little higher as it came up to speed.

  He entered the cab and looked at the Operator’s seat. The foot controls would be a problem, just like Lavachek said. In order to work them, you had to bend your knees.

  “All torqued up, Boss,” Lavachek said behind him.

  Habershaw didn’t want to sit down and have Lavachek see him wince as he tested the foot paddles. He sure as hell didn’t want him standing over his shoulder all day while he worked and fought the pain. He’d have to keep him out of the cab.

  “Go below and keep your eye on the oil levels in the track pumps. They were acting a little sluggish yesterday afternoon.”

  “They’re always fine.”

  “Check ‘em anyway. I’ll wag back and forth a few times with each track. Turn on the oil level log, I wanna see that, too.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Yep. Get your headset on.”

  He waited until Lavachek was halfway down the catwalk before he went in the cab and sat down. The first thing he did was raise his right foot up on the paddle for the right track and strap it in. The pain started as soon as he lifted it. By the time the straps were tightened down, he thought he was going to faint. He pressed down and felt the effortless movement, like a smooth soft spring under his foot as the paddle went down. There was no apparent sense of track movement, just an increase in the pitch of the motors and the view out the front window began to shift from left to right as the huge rig’s rightmost track turned. He released the pressure on the paddle, and grimaced against the pain as the leg came up and bent. The left to right movement stopped.

  The other leg was no problem. He strapped it to the paddle, pressed down and brought the rig back to its original orientation.

  He put his headset on his head and turned the system on.

  “How’s the pressure?”

  “Fine. Like always.”

  “Okay, hell with it. Ready to go to work?”

  “Systems all check out. Ready when you are.”

  Habershaw turned on the monitors and brought up the topographical overlays. They showed him precisely where he was and gave him a view of the terrain in three dimensions. The rig was rendered in high detail against the rugged landscape. All Habershaw had to do was guide the little bulldozer on the monitor over the terrain and change the pitch and declination of the blade as required. The massive machine would do the rest. He could look past the flat monitors and see the
actual landscape if he wanted, but he preferred the four views that the system provided.

  He backed up to take another swipe at the hill in front of the rig, but when he took pressure off the right paddle, he closed his eyes against the pain and moaned. He hoped the pain killers would kick in soon.

  Lavachek settled in his seat in the lower cab and squirmed back and forth to test it. He’d just patched the split in the seat with tape so it wouldn’t pinch his ass when he got up like it did yesterday. He brushed the dirt off the little ledge next to the seat, opened his lunch box, unwrapped a sandwich, took a bite and put it down on the clean spot. From the lower cab, Lavachek could monitor each of the rig’s systems and alert the Operator of any impending problems. That was his job, and he was damned tired of it. He lifted his foot and dropped it down on one of the monitors with a thump. He had the same views of the landscape and the rig as Habershaw, but with no control over either.

  Sit and watch. That’s me, Lavachek thought.

  He scarfed down the sandwich and idly watched the monitors, wishing he were somewhere else, anywhere else. He watched the little representation of the enormous dozer work its way over and through the terrain, reducing hills and gullies to flattened nothings. From time to time, the pitch of the cab would change forward or back, left or right, and he’d brace against it. In spite of the roughness of the terrain, the ride was smooth as if he were riding the swells of an ocean in a huge, heavy boat. He’d never seen a Caterpillar Brute 9000 that couldn’t reduce any geological feature to mashed earth in about ten seconds.

  Too bad I won’t get the chance to try this one.

  Habershaw was pretty good as Operators went. Lavachek had worked for some of the worst. Operators were a fairly egotistical bunch on the whole. He’d once worked for a man named Nypurky, or something like that, who’d told him on his first day that he did “all the oilin’ myself.”

  “Why the hell do you need me then?” Lavachek had asked.

  “Contract says I gotta have a Oiler, ‘at's why.”

  Lavachek knew that, and the comment had really frosted him. That was one useless contract. He didn’t get any practice; and if he couldn’t get to practice, he might just as well have stayed home. Operating was where the money was and, for a non-certified tradesman, it was one of the best ways to get your contract paid down. Besides, there wasn’t anything he’d rather do than munch a bunch of hills and trees and stuff them into mud. That was fun.

  They had a lot to do before their contract was up. They’d probably be on this dozer for three months or longer. Maybe Habershaw would loosen up and give him some days at the controls later on, after the job settled in. That’s usually the way it went. Then after the rough work was done, they’d bring down the grader to finish up. That could take another three months. There was time.

  He had to admire Habershaw for his negotiating skills. He’d made himself the only Operator; that was quite a trick. And Lavachek was the only Oiler. Something good would have to come out of that.

  He sat up and paid more attention to the monitors. After all, Habershaw was a good Operator; maybe he could learn something from him.

  Habershaw put the rig into a hard left turn by pressing down on the right paddle. Just as he did, the parasite began to do what it had attached to him to do in the first place. Its life was nearly at an end. In its passing, a hundred more would live. The organism clamped down tighter with its forelegs, nearly pinching them together in Habershaw’s flesh and simultaneously releasing what was left of the alkali in the sacs at the base of each leg. The object was simple: to make the host move, run and flail about.

  Habershaw screamed and jammed the leg out straight.

  The back of the swollen parasite split cleanly and its offspring, early larval forms of the adult, began to tumble out of it and down the inside of Habershaw’s pants leg.

  The pain blinded him, and he began to pump the leg in short little kicks. As he did, the pale, centimeter-long larvae fell out of his pants and began to scatter, crawling in all directions, falling through cracks and scrabbling along the welded seams of the cab’s floor.

  It felt as if the back of his leg was on fire, but he was unable to move. The fire was slightly less when the leg was straight. Bending it was impossible. He was trapped by the blistering pain and the straps holding his foot to the controller.

  “God . . . damm . . . it!”

  The parasite sensed that not all the offspring had been freed from its husk. With the strength it had left, it pinched again. Habershaw closed his eyes tight and opened his mouth in a silent scream, then stamped both feet down.

  Below in the lower cab, Lavachek saw the rig pivot to the left and head into the jungle. His first thought was that Habershaw was seeking a unique angle on some feature in order to flatten it, but it didn’t seem right. He could see the thick tangle of trees and vines parting in the wake of the dozer’s blade. With each second Habershaw didn’t stop or turn, Lavachek became more convinced something was wrong. “What the hell is he doing?” he said to the monitor.

  The big swamp had existed for a thousand years. Choked with trees and soft plants, it was virtually invisible from any vantage on the rig.

  The dozer walked out over the swamp, its tracks just barely touching the water. Out and out it went until the huge machine’s center of gravity caused it to fall forward. The tracks crushed down through the pulpy mass of fallen trees and dead plants as if they weren’t there. The ends of the tracks mashed through the three meters of water and churned down into the soft swamp bottom, turning the water to mud.

  Lavachek felt the rig tip forward a little farther than normal. When it went forward even more, he sprang from his seat and headed up the ladder to the control cab. Something was wrong.

  Habershaw could see glimpses of the water through the window and saw the swell of the huge wave that lifted the plants and rolled through them ahead of the rig.

  “Oh, fuck! Goddammit!”

  He had operated rigs like this for years. He knew exactly what to do to keep the rig from sinking further: lower the blade and hope it would hold the rig up against the swamp bottom.

  In shock and dazed by the pain, Bill Habershaw made the worst error of his adult life and raised the blade.

  “Fuck!”

  In the seconds it took for him to realize his mistake, the tracks sank another five meters into the goo. By the time the blade started back down another five meters had been lost. Before the rig stopped sinking, fully half of it was buried in the muck. Stuck in the swamp at a forty-five degree angle, the muddy water was inches from the control cab, and Habershaw found himself leaning against the front window, looking down at a mass of green and wet foliage crushed against it.

  Sensing that the rig had tipped over, the motors shut themselves off, leaving only the sound of water lapping at the under parts of the huge machine.

  Lavachek slid down the catwalk on his butt, using his boots as a brake.

  “What the hell happened?”

  The pain in Habershaw’s leg had subsided enough that he could speak. The leg was still stretched out straight, vibrating with a life of its own.

  “Unconnect me from the goddamned paddles. I can’t bend my leg.”

  Lavachek crawled into the cab sideways, fighting the gravity that tried to pull him into the water. He saw the blood dripping out of the cuff of Habershaw’s cottons as he unstrapped the foot.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “No shit.”

  Habershaw got himself turned around and with his leg outstretched, managed to crawl over to the catwalk and anchor himself to the railing. Lavachek was a meter farther up, his legs spread and his feet firmly planted against each side of the railing.

  “What happened?”

  “Rig went out of control.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said the rig went out of control.”

  “How did it do that?

  “We don’t know. You got that. We don’t know. And when Smith asks you, t
hat’d better be your goddamned answer until I think of a better one.”

  Lavachek was no dummy. Habershaw had screwed up, big-time, and if it ever came out that he sank a Brute 9000 up to the cab in a swamp, he’d be finished as an Operator. Brute 9000’s were probably the most expensive single item in the general contractor’s fleet. Lavachek was non-certified, but he could connect the dots as well as the next guy. There was nothing to gain by going against Habershaw—at least for the moment.

  “It went out of control—just like that?” he asked.

  “That’s all the hell you know.”

  Lavachek thought about it. “Okay. So how the hell did it happen?”

  “We’d better move up, the goddamned thing’s still sinking,” Habershaw said.

  “This muck is gonna swallow the damn rig whole,” Lavachek said.

  “Sure looks like it.”

  They crawled and pulled themselves up the catwalk until they were at the very end of the rig. Looking out over the rear, the path the dozer had cut could be seen as a perfectly straight swath lanced through the thick jungle. It certainly seemed plausible that the rig went out of control. Why else would an experienced Operator drive a billion dollar machine straight into a swamp four hundred meters from the work area?

  Habershaw propped himself against the railing, sat down and carefully pulled up his pant’s leg.

  “Jesus, what is that?”

  “Joan thought it was some kind of tick or something. It got on me last night.”

  Lavachek inched closer and looked at it. The entire back of the creature was split open and hollow like a seed pod.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “It looks dead if you ask me.”