by David Coy
“I haven’t been seeing clearly until just now. Jacob’s presence seemed to somehow…I don’t know…maybe it was the centipede bite…” her voice trailed off.
“I know,” he said.
They stood, wrapped as one; heads turned in opposite directions, and silently took in the enormity of the jungle for a moment.
“I couldn’t have imagined this,” Rachel finally said. “The sheer volume of the biodiversity here. It is awesome and beautiful, yes. But I’ll tell you one thing—this planet will never be conquered. And if yours is the attitude we take we won’t last a decade. So don’t give me that beat the shit out of it horseshit.”
“I only know one thing, Rachel,” he said holding her tighter. “You have our child—our own little parasite—growing inside you. And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure she survives. Even on Verde’s Revenge.”
It may not be enough, Rachel thought.
* * *
“You seem to have things under control,” Donna said. “I like that.”
Paul was sitting at his desk in the middle of one of the main sub-chambers he had commandeered as his office. One of his enforcers was stationed at the door, as usual, guarding him, and she’d had to throw the comment around the guard’s body to get it into the room. Donna recognized the guard as Javier something, a youngish ex-soldier with eyes that flashed from quizzical to predatory with ease. She gave him a predatory look of her own as she swept past him into the room.
“Well, I’m trying,” Paul said, leaning back in his chair as she came in. “I don’t expect to be in this job too much longer. Someone better-equipped to lead than me should have the role.”
“Look, I . . . uh . . . I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” she said, sliding one hip onto his desk. “That was very good of you.”
“My pleasure,” he said.
“I mean it,” she went on. “I’m in your debt.”
“That’s a debt you don’t have to repay,” Paul said. “Besides, Mike thinks the world of you. He talks about that little surgery you did on him as if it were a miracle.”
“Mike’s a good kid,” she said with a smile.
“Yeah,” he said with a proud look, “And I told our father I’d always look after him. We Kominskis keep our promises.”
“Nice quality,” she said.
Donna had something else on her mind and let a beat pass before bringing it up.
“So, I heard that Smith’s on his way down,” she said. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“What do you want to happen to him?” Paul asked.
“Well, I have a biased opinion of Smith,” she said with a scrunched smile. “We don’t see eye-to-eye on some things.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Yes. Smith had those two sonsofbitches he calls assistants pitch me out of a shuttle five hundred meters above the jungle. I survived that little fall—thanks to a very forgiving tree—and hiked for five days back to the compound. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend five full days in the green—without shelter—or even a net suit? No food, no water, just a useless little purse and the clothes on your back?
“Well, I’ve never carried a purse…” he said wryly.
She smiled. “Well, it’s no picnic.”
Paul drew a breath. “I heard about your ordeal. That’s just one other thing Smith will stand trial for.”
“Stand trial?” she asked, her jaw dropping.
“Yes. Stand trial,” he repeated. “It’s the thing to do.”
“Okay, Paul. Put him on trial. But know this… if I get the chance, I’ll kill the sonofabitch—him and those pretty-smelling assistants of his, too. And I’ll do it with a clear conscience.”
“Look, I know how you must feel,” he said. “And in spite of what I’d like to do to him myself, it’s best for the colony if we at least go through the motions of a trial.”
Donna thought it over.
“Fine. Give him a trial. But if he and his bodyguards wind up dead or missing, it won’t be me that's had a hand in it.”
Paul looked up into that half-blue, half-brown eye as it blazed. He was sure he had never seen a face so bent on revenge. “No. I guess it wouldn’t be you, would it now?” he said knowingly.
Donna looked him steadily in the eye, pursed her lips and slowly shook her head.
"Between you and me, I don’t think either of us will have to worry about it,” he said. “Smith’s going to get exactly what he deserves.”
* * *
Mike thought the work was going well. He was doing a good job. It had scared him at first because he and Peter were the only expeditors left, ,and the job had been so big and so important; but now, after a day or two of actually doing the work, things were okay.
He made a note on the record for the container he’d just inventoried and sat down to give his foot a rest.
“We’re almost done with this section,” he whispered to himself proudly. “Almost…”
Paul had given Mike the job of inventorying the containers and of creating a map so they could tell where everything was. He wanted the job done by end of the week, just 3 days away. But the job was going much faster than he thought it would, and he was sure they could finish a day early—easy.
Mike had recruited Peter and the new girl Jody to help him. Jody was the daughter of the one of the Bondsmen, but she and Peter had become fast friends. The same age as Mike and Peter, she had followed Peter around for a whole day, like a puppy, as Peter explained how the movement of stuff happens. Peter had explained to her that the usual process hadn’t been followed when they moved to the monolith, and she soon understood that everything was so scrambled at the site, they’d never be able to find anything until it were re-inventoried. When she offered to help, Mike told her, “Hey, we can always use a good hand.” It had been the first time he’d acted in a supervisory position, and it felt good to give someone who was smart and ready to help a job. She’d pitched right in, and Mike liked that.
She told Mike and Peter on one of their breaks that she never liked all the gunk, as she called it, that the Sacred Bond taught in those daily classes. Mike was intuitive and knew that since he and Peter didn’t believe in that stuff, Jody might just be saying it to be friendly. It didn’t matter much to Mike. He would have liked her even if she did believe in it.
Peter and Jody walked toward him between the stacks of containers. Jody was slapping at Peter’s arm as if he’s said something fresh. Peter was flinching away from her taps and laughing.
“Hey, Mike,” Peter said. “Jody likes you!”
“Shut up!” Jody smiled and slapped at him again. “I do not!”
Mike didn’t know what to say. He smiled shyly, “Oh,” he said.
“We’re done with the stack on the other side of this one,” Peter said. “Do you want us to start on another one?”
Mike could tell that Jody was tired from all the walking and scrambling over the containers. She was pooped and probably bored. “Nah,” he said. “That’s enough for one day, I think. It’s getting late, and I’m hungry.”
“Me, too,” Jody said, brushing her hair behind one ear.
“Besides,” Mike said. “Paul says he doesn’t want anybody outside when the sun starts to go down.”
“That won’t be for hours yet,” Peter offered.
“I know,” Mike said. “But this isn’t the only thing we have to get done. Paul wants us to finish moving the medical gear into the new clinic area. While we're there, we can show Jody how to drive a lift.”
“Yes! Yes! Let’s do that next!” Jody said, perking up considerably. “That sounds like fun!”
“Okay,” Mike said. “That’s settled then. Let’s go.”
The containers were stacked three up in four rows in a staging area that had been carved out of the jungle by the huge dozer. Each row was about five hundred meters long. They walked back toward the monolith through the canyon of containers.
“I didn’t know there were
so many of these,” Jody commented.
“I know,” Peter responded. “Me and Mike and…some other guys…” his voice trailed off.
“The other guys we worked with are dead,” Mike said. “The wasps got ‘em. Anyway, they helped us get all these moved from the compound to the monolith. That was a huge job.”
“Oh,” Jody said.
Peter brightened a second later and continued his lesson on Logistics 101 for Jody’s benefit.
The containers, Peter explained as they walked, were spaced far enough apart that the doors on either end could be opened, and the contents removed with a lift when needed. All you had to do was to know where everything was at all times. That was the key. Inside the containers were closed crates packed with supplies. She knew that already, she said. The lifts were designed to interlock with the crates. Everything was modular. A lift could lift two thousand kilos and move at twenty-four kilometers an hour on level ground. She knew that, too, because he’d told her that yesterday, she huffed.
As they walked past the space between two stacks of containers, something caught Mike’s eye at the jungle’s edge just a few meters away. A big patch of leaves had moved as if something had been startled.
“Did you see that?” he asked them.
“What?” Jody asked.
“The leaves moved,” Mike said.
“The leaves always move,” Peter said, his eyes scanning the foliage.
“Not like that,” Mike said. “Let’s get back.”
“Yeah let’s go,” Jody said. “You’re scarin’ me.”
Thoroughly spooked, they raced back to the safety of the monolith.
* * *
“Thanks for coming, Rachel,” Paul said to her. “I know you’re busy.”
“No problem,” she said. “I could use a break.”
“Have a seat,” he said.
She obliged with a warm look but wondered what the meeting was all about. She hoped it wasn’t about Smith. She’d heard he was in custody, and she wasn’t very interested in being distracted by any business around that particular bug right now.
“So how can I help you, Paul?” she asked.
“I haven’t had a chance to ask you about the Verdians in any detail,” he said. “And I need all the information you can give me about them.”
Rachel thought about it. “Sure,” she said. “I can give you what I know…”
“I know what you know already,” he interrupted with a consoling smile. “What I really need is what you think!”
“That’s a tougher question,” she said.
“I need to know how much of a threat they are, Rachel.”
Rachel mulled it over a little, shifted in her chair and crossed and uncrossed her legs. The Verdians were a mystery, but she did have some interesting, and disturbing, ideas about them. Most of the ideas she had come to her when she was in her more fright-filled moods. The Verdians scared her. There was something inexplicably wrong about them. Somehow, they didn’t fit. She couldn’t put her finger on it. All she knew was that they occupied a large part of her imagination during every waking hour. They’d even found ways to violate her sleep state; and when they did, they transmogrified any innocent or curious vision she might have been having during her dreams to horrid nightmares filled with pain or fat spiders.
“Hmm. Okay. I’ll speculate then. How’s that?” she offered and swallowed. Maybe it would be good just to get this off her shoulders and give the burden of these horrid creatures to someone with a lot of guns and explosives to carry for a while.
“Sounds perfect,” he said. “I’m listening.”
“I can’t tell too much from the few archeological examples we have, obviously, but there are some clues in the artifacts.”
“Go,” he said.
“First of all, I don’t think there are many of them. I could be off about this, but I just don’t get the sense of unbridled proliferation at work when I think about them. I see them cloistered in several locations on the planet, not thousands. If I had to guess, I’d say there are maybe a thousand, possibly two thousand individuals total. That comes from the fact that I see no evidence of younger or immature examples in the remains in the monolith.”
“Okay. That could be encouraging,” he said.
“They are probably long-lived,” she went on. “Perhaps hundreds of years old at maturity.”
“Where does that come from?”
“I’ve examined the bone structure of a couple of the mummified examples we found in the monolith. The bones are slight, weak, but the joints are simply old. The calcification buildup and wear on the cusps suggest great age.” She stopped and thought for a second. “They think differently than we do,” she said changing direction. “Their technology suggests some kind of duality of mind. That’s the only way I can put it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they have successfully created a technology capable of interplanetary travel, which depends on what we would think of as a normal approach to discovery around physics and physical laws, yet they’ve spent half their time studying living things and turning the manipulation of organic material into a fantastic technology, and then somehow blended physics and biology together. To us, the idea of blending physics and biology into a single technological framework is unfathomable. We just assume it can’t be done.”
“So they don’t think like we do?” Paul asked, repeating back the best he could understand of Rachel's sophisticated knowledge.
“Just as I said,” she smiled. “They seem to be a lot smarter than we are, but they’re also very stupid in some ways. They are great integrators, but the simple stuff eludes them.”
“Like stupid how?”
“Well, consider for a moment their choice of weapons,” she said, knowing that the question would pique his attention. “They spend generations upon generations developing a biological weapon that, as effective as it is, is not nearly as destructive as a simple bomb.”
“But from what you described,” Paul said with a thoughtful frown, “their weapon targets only their enemies with little or no collateral damage. Sounds like a good weapon to have in your arsenal.”
“Yes. That’s true. We, on the other hand, if we could find them, could wipe them out with just a few nukes. Sure, we’d leave craters the size of a city in the jungle and kill everything for kilometers all around, but they’d be dead. That would be our goal. I don’t think the idea of using a bomb is something they would think of as a rational thought.”
“How do you know they don’t have a nuke or two waiting for us?”
“Because they didn’t use it,” Rachel said flatly. “It’s almost as if the biological precision of the wasps is somehow a cultural imperative, and that killing only a ‘bad’ species is permitted.” She paused and ran her hand over her eyes and back over her head. “Look, I’m a biologist. I understand how important each species in any ecosystem is to the whole. They do, too. But for them it’s like they…they take it to the next level. They understand so much more about how the pieces fit together in an ecosystem than we do. So, like I said, they’re smarter than we are—and dumber, too.” She shook her head ruefully. “At the same time, they’ll take individual representatives of any species and cut it up, blend it with, amalgamate it, morph it with and stitch it to any other species just to see what happens. I think they do that just to see what use they can make out of the new little monster they’ve created. Unlike Erlich and his little team, they really know how to use that blending technology. They invented it.”
That was the part she didn’t understand. That was the thing that churned inside her and gave her the nightmares. That was the thing that was wrong.
“So you haven’t told me what kind of threat you think they are to the colony,” Paul said cocking his head.
She swallowed and put aside the thoughts of the hideous artifacts she’d found in the monolith. “In the short term,” she went on. “I doubt they’re much of a threat. I think they used t
he most effective weapon they have against us, and it worked—it killed most of us off. That weapon can’t be used again as I understand it. I doubt they have anything like an infantry or air force or tanks or guns. They may have other biological devices you might call weapons available, but my suspicion is that they they’ve used their most destructive one on us already. And for all we know, they may be perfectly happy with the result.”
“What do you mean?” Paul asked.
“It’s like I said in the meeting,” she said. “Our numbers are so low now that we probably won’t survive as a species. My guess is that they think they’ve won the war already. All they have to do is sit back and wait for the last one of us to die. The planet itself will kill us. They know this entire system inside and out. So they must know that, too. It’s just a matter of time.”
Paul nodded, his eyes narrowing just slightly.
“That brings me to the last thing about them I think,” she said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Patience. They are extremely old—and extremely patient.”
“From what you’ve said it doesn’t sound like they’re much of threat,” he said.
“We’ll be lucky even to see one of them,” she said, desperately hoping it was true.
* * *
Donna held up the vial of clear liquid, pushed it through the bars a few inches and swished it around so Smith could see it. “Know what this is?” she asked him, her eye blazing.
“New sweetener you’ve invented?” Smith asked sardonically.
“Not quite,” she said. “If I have my way, I’ll be the one to pour this shit over your heads.”
Wethers and Lindstrom were sitting side by side against the far wall, and were not quite as nonplused as Smith. Wethers couldn’t quite take his eyes off the vial of Villaroos plant extract. Lindstrom gave his fear away by deliberately not looking at the plant extract.
