Scorched Earth

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  An M88 could fire five hundred times on a single charge, taking only five seconds to recharge the capacitor between shots. As he expected, five seconds after the initial volley, another one reached out, exploding six more plants into mist.

  “Get some!” he shouted, his voice muffled by the vines holding him.

  The soldiers might have been single-minded in tearing the factory apart, but they were still soldiers, plant-things or not. Almost as one, they turned to face the threat and surged forward.

  Colby shifted his perspective, and a platoon of Marines was entering the building in perfect assault formation through the destroyed back walls. His heart raced with excitement, and he longed to be out there, a lieutenant again, leading the assault. In their mech battlesuits, Marines were a menacing sight to most bad guys, but to him, they were comfort, pride, and. . . yes, love, all rolled into one.

  He needed to let the Marines know what they were facing. He tried to pull them up through his implant, but it was like barreling down a highway only to hit a stone wall. Nothing went through, and he wasn’t sure why. He started a troubleshooting worm to work on it, then turned his attention back to the fight.

  Another volley of lasers cut down the soldiers in the front of the rush towards the Marines. The soldier next to Colby’s exploded, the force knocking his viewpoint plant to its knees? Lower extremity? A wave of panic roared through him. He’d just had one host under his control killed, and it was not something he wanted to go through again. He shifted his focus away from the action, jumping to one of the soldiers outside the building.

  “Damn!” was all he could say.

  He’d been focusing on the factory, knowing there was much more going on, but not to what extent. Every factory or warehouse in sight was flattened or close to it. Thousands. . . tens of thousands of plant soldiers were pouring out of the wreckage, converging on what looked to be two rifle companies, about two hundred Marines. Three crew-served M280 particle-beam cannons were spewing nano-pulse beams of death, mowing down the plant soldiers like so much genwheat in the path of an unrelenting harvester.

  The toll on the soldiers was frightening. A thousand had already died, the particulate flurry of their remains giving rise to that green mist. More frightening, however, was that the wave of vegetable bodies inched closer and closer to the Marines.

  “You are too dispersed!” Colby yelled out to the commander, even knowing no one could hear him.

  Almost immediately, the platoon that had been entering the building started to pull back, and for a moment, Colby watched in shock.

  Can I control the Marines, too? No, that’s impossible. The commander was taught the same as I was and is seeing the same thing.

  Marines are taught to take the fight to the enemy, to seek them out and destroy them. But with thousands of plant soldiers eagerly advancing on the Marines, sometimes the best offense was a good defense. By creating a strong defensive perimeter, the Marines could employ interlocking and mutually supporting fields of fire, creating an impenetrable wall of energy.

  In theory.

  The M280s were devastating weapons, but they were big, bulky, and not very maneuverable—not so much due to the cannon itself, but from the powerpack. Particle beam weapons were energy hogs, better suited for tank bodies or Navy ships. The cooling coils alone were larger than the projector tubes. For a crew-served weapon, the Achilles heel was changing out the power cell. In normal operations, a three-cannon section would rotate the power cell switch-out so at least two cannons were up at all times. This time, the numbers of plant soldiers closing in were so huge, the firing was so intense, that the choreography was interrupted, and two of the weapons had gone offline at the same time.

  With a huge gap, the Marine riflemen couldn’t keep up with the mass of the charging plant soldiers, and they reached their Little Big Top, breaking into the line of Marines. Monomolecular blades took over from rifles as the fight devolved into hand-to-branch combat, but while the M88 exploded the plant soldiers, cutting them was far less effective. Even missing arms or with huge chunks taken out of the bodies, the plant soldiers kept up the attack like zombies seeking brains.

  Hell, do something, Edson!

  He’d been so caught up in the fight, switching from one host to the other, that he’d forgotten that he could still affect the battle. At least fifty of the plant soldiers were amongst the Marines, and several Marines were down. One lay still on the ground, left arm gone while three plant soldiers were tearing the cerroalloy ISP armor apart. The same armor that could withstand a 105mm artillery round was like papier-mâché to the plants’ relentless strength.

  A Marine stepped up, and with a tremendous blow from the monomolecular blade extending from the battlesuit’s arm, sliced one of the soldiers attacking the downed Marine in half, separating the lower ambulatory “legs” from the rest. Even so, it still kept prying apart bits of battlesuit.

  Colby swooped in, a hawk on a rabbit, flooding one of the three soldiers, and took control. His host released its hold on the broken edge of the battlesuit’s chest carapace, and at Colby’s direction, shifted to the other fully functional soldier, intertwining its arms in the other’s, immobilizing it.

  Marines closed in, firing kinetic handguns, which didn’t bother Colby much, but also swinging bladed arms, which hurt like hell. What had been simply vague impressions of pain were now much more pronounced. As his implant’s control of the interface had improved, the tactile transfer had grown stronger as well.

  Colby stayed in place, however, absorbing the pain until he felt the soldier’s remaining arms starting to lose their grip before withdrawing. He didn’t want to risk being connected when the thing died.

  His skin still tingled, as if he’d been cut himself. He took a couple of deep breaths, then dove back into the fray. He pulled two more soldiers off Marines before the soldiers inside the lines started exploding again.

  About freaking time!

  A Marine battlesuit could take a fairly good pounding from a microwave weapon, and getting “hosed down” was an accepted course of action when the enemy was intermixed with Marines. The cannons must be back online, so the Marines who’d been concentrating on keeping more plant soldiers from reaching them could focus on their buddies and clear the lines.

  Colby shifted outside the Marine lines to one of the soldiers in the back of the mob. What had been thousands was far, far fewer as more and more were cut down. That green mist was now a thick green fog, which was not good for the Marines. Particle beams were amazing weapons, but they lost power through electrostatic bloom, and that effect was heightened with particulates in the air. The cannon beams cut the air with a shimmering glow, but that glowing meant energy was being diverted.

  Some of the plants around him didn’t have the same fervor, if he was reading plant body language correctly. A couple hundred broke off from the rear of the pack, including his host. For a moment, he thought they were quitting the field of battle, but no, there was a purpose to the movement. They had not lost their fervor--this group was maneuvering to flank the Marines. If the body of plant soldiers were being controlled by the boss plant, then the boss must have realized it was wasting bodies, and was changing tactics.

  These were not mindless automatons—well, perhaps the soldiers themselves were, but not the force guiding them. That made them much more dangerous.

  Colby jumped to one of the lead soldiers and commanded it to divert, hoping the others would follow. They didn’t. They bypassed his captured host and kept marching. He was about to order his host to tackle one of the others, but it wouldn’t do much good. The fight was well out of his hands.

  Instead, he turned his host around and sent it to the back of the main body where it would hopefully become a Marine target. He pulled out of it, then tried to digest what the remaining thousands of frames showed him. If he could see a pattern in what the plants were doing, then get that to the commander, then he’d be contributing . . .

  Beside him, Duk
e yelped piteously and struggled for a moment, before settling into a whine.

  “Calm down, girl. I’m here,” he said, stroking her side with the tips of his fingers, a tiny motion, but one that seemed to help her.

  He wondered what had set her off before it hit him. He’d felt what it was like to be in a host when it was killed. He’d wager Duke had been out there, inside one of the soldiers when the Marines had destroyed it. For a moment, his anger rose against the Marines, the bastards, the—

  What the hell, Edson? What are you thinking?

  He’d never, ever, thought bad about the Marines, not even when he was being cashiered out of the service. He’d hated a few other Marines during his career, and he hated Vice-Minister Greenstein with a passion, but that wasn’t the Corps. He loved the Corps, and he felt an overwhelming sense of guilt over what he’d just felt.

  How could that have happened?

  Something taking over a large proportion of the frames caught his attention, diverting him from his guilt. It was the Marines, launching into their attack.

  “Oo-rah!” he shouted, wondering if that was still from his heart.

  The Marines poured in tight company wedges designed to pierce the remaining plants with maximum firepower to the front and flanks. One company headed to cut off the plants that were trying to envelope them. Colby should have known that the commander would have been aware of the situation and had recognized the same thing he had.

  “Just let him fight. You’re not in command,” he muttered.

  With the cannons remaining back to deliver supporting fire, the Marines tore through the diminished numbers, blasting plant soldiers into bits and pieces. The green fog of death intensified and more soldiers were vaporized, but as the Marines closed in, their weapons kept spitting out death. The two companies were machines, killing machines. The plants didn’t have a chance.

  More and more of his frames winked out, and he began to lose his situational awareness of what was happening. There were too many gaps, but that was a good thing. It meant the Marines were winning. Within an hour, he was down to seven frames, seven left from the thousands or tens of thousands—he’d never been able to determine just how many there’d been. From what he could tell, these were from seven immobile soldiers, probably wounded too much to continue to fight.

  One was at what looked to be the old defensive position. Colby took a chance and slipped around it, taking it captive. He tried to get it to move, but while he could sense it trying to respond, nothing happened. It lacked arms it could move, or legs stalks to escape. It couldn’t even wriggle its body. From the larger pieces of green chunks around it, Colby thought it had to be one of those that had reached the Marine lines only to be chopped down by the blades.

  At least its senses worked. Colby slipped back out, but gave its frame his primary attention. A few Marines were within its sensory range, beyond which was the thick green fog of dead plant bits. A breeze picked up, slowly blowing the fog away and revealing the Marines, like monsters emerging from the schlockiest holovid, as they returned. The sight was impressive, and Colby hoped the surveillance drones that had to be flying overhead were recording this. Images like these convinced young men and women to enlist.

  But something was wrong. Some of the Marines were limping, their battlesuits giving uncharacteristic lurches. Marine battlesuits tended to either work or not. They could be blasted to smithereens by heavy kinetics, they could be fried by energy weapons that overcame their shielding, but they didn’t tend to get merely damaged. Once the armor or shielding failed, it was usually a catastrophic kill.

  As he watched the Marines form up, more and more were in obvious distress. Colby was baffled. He switched among his remaining seven feeds, but the one from the defensive position provided the best view, and that revealed nothing. More and more of the Marines lurched about, and several platoons moved into defensive positions, weapons outboard.

  One Marine stopped dead in midstride, then another. Others froze as well. Within minutes a good third of the Marines had become unmoving statues. A battlesuit was effective because it both protected a Marine from fire while allowing the Marine to close with and destroy the enemy. Without maneuverability, it was just a pillbox waiting for the enemy to outmaneuver it. Colby wasn’t surprised when first one, then in a rush, Marines were molting, getting out of their suits. Wary Marines, now armed with the smaller man-packed weapons, took positions by their dead battlesuits, facing outboard, and probably wondering just what the hell had happened. Colby wondered that as well.

  The two companies of Marines had won a decisive battle, overcoming a veritable horde of enemy plant soldiers with what might have been a single friendly casualty. Now, after the battle, the Marines had somehow been stripped of their biggest advantage.

  The Marines had won the battle, but from what Colby could see, it was a Pyrrhic victory.

  Interlude II: A New World, A New Infestation

  The Gardener’s supply-pod-turned-escape-vessel skimmed across the atmosphere of the mud-red planet, venting velocity and attempting to limit temperature extremes as it descended. The limited sensory details it could access revealed a barren world, one that would take thousands of revolutions of effort and planning to transform into a garden. Robotic vessels appeared to come and go from a single point, a slight deviation from the mud, presumably the destination for the unthinkable, space-faring Meat. As terrifying as that prospect was, it was also the only place to have the living resources needed to restore itself, or to grow the tools needed to protect itself from the Meat.

  It adjusted its course and fell from the sky. There was no way to know what technological capabilities this new Meat had mastered, and the Gardener’s best course was to act like an insignificant bit of space debris, some remnant that was left from a larger chunk that had all but burned up in reentry. Moments before striking down, its sensors discerned the shapes of artificial structures much like the invading Meat had built within its garden world, but also thousands of vast containers, each easily as large as its former vessel. Several of the containers were open and its sensors detected organic material, much of it similar to the material contaminating the garden it had recently purged.

  It could work with that.

  At the last instant, the Gardener manipulated mathematical constructs, twisting gravity and velocity. Its pod still crashed, but did not crater the ground or destroy its cargo. Moreover, it had positioned itself near one of the containers. It reviewed its stock, reviewed the plans it had made, and released a plume of tiny seeds high into the air. A portion would enter the container, take root within the material it found there. In less than a rotation of this muddy world this new seeding would yield the Gardener’s first wave. The Meat would be stopped.

  ***************

  Protocols existed for every contingency, hundreds of thousands of scenarios and situations which had never occurred had nonetheless been modeled and analyzed, extrapolated and resolved. If the Gardener felt any distress, it was less about its situation than the peculiarity of finding itself utilizing such procedures.

  Complexities of redundancies defined its people’s life view. What point even conceptualizing a venture if one were to begin without all possibilities accounted for? Viewed in such a light, its current predicament was at worst a minor inconvenience.

  The initial seeding required only a two-percent success rate. Given sufficient time, even the most arid or acidic environment would yield success. But Meat, regardless of its manifestation, was always short-lived, which in turn meant that time was a limited resource. Fortunately, there was evidence of spillage around the target cargo container to suggest they contained a variety of organic matter, and in such profusion that inspection had resulted in a sample of the cargo escaping. The Gardener’s released seeds absorbed the bits of debris and pursued the genetic option that it had activated in them before their dispersal.

  Seven purge agents—the same tools it had lately planted by the tens of thousands on i
ts garden world—took form and together advanced on the nearest container, working in concert along an accessible seam. Two pressed immature forward tendrils into that seam, even as the other five dedicated their brief existence to generating and transferring the powerful acids that allowed the initial pair to create microscopic runnels adequate for their pollen, which continued the process. These five withered, but had served their purpose. Complex carbon chains were altered, co-opted, shattered. Cracks radiated from several places along the seam, and just that simply, the two surviving purge agents breached the cargo container. The entire process had taken scant minutes.

  The pair hefted the now-desiccated remnants of the other five purge agents that had already gone to seed and tore them into smaller bits, stuffing the pieces through the cracks into the organic matter below, grain of some form, more than adequate for the current need. These seeds fed upon the grain, broke it down, produced a new generation of seeds that in turn consumed still more grain and germinated into more purge agents, hundreds of them. They tore the cargo container apart from the inside. Half moved toward structures that the Meat had erected for their own inscrutable but offensive purposes. The remainder split into smaller groups, each targeting other standalone containers and, further afield, whole stacks of containers, to repeat their genesis. Soon, thousands of leafy agents advanced on the structures, tearing them open. Some entered to attack their contents—absorbing any organics and destroying inorganics, according to their genetics directives—others applied their talents to breaking down the Meat’s structures themselves, guided by the directives the Gardener had built into their every fiber.

  From the shattered safety of its pod, half-buried in mud and dirt, the Gardener directed its agents with a light touch, the majority of its focus devoted to ratiocination and the need to incorporate so much novel data into a plan to alert its people.

  It scarcely noted when the remnants of its vessel arrived, delivered like plucked weeds and shattered branches to the far side of the array of cargo containers. In the fullness of time it would grow a new vessel, but that was a future concern and not something it allowed to intrude on its thoughts. Eventually, a more insistent interruption broke its concentration. Several squadrons of Mechs arrived, pulling its focus to their actions as they spawned confusion. With brutal efficiency the Mechs began destroying its purge agents with energy waves. But no, not actual Mech life, these nuisances were more Meat, Meat that had developed technology to mimic the appearance and behavior of Mech. Their presence dictated a more nuanced response than it had built into the genes of its purge agents.