by Unknown
A gentle rain on Umma’s face woke her from dreams of suffocation. She gasped and then groaned. Everything hurt. She opened crusty eyes but instantly closed them again. The stabbing pain in her head made even the pre-dawn gloom unbearable. Each breath felt like swallowing broken glass. Every inch of skin felt covered with hot coals. Yet, even in her agony, she appreciated the cool drizzle.
Deep in her consciousness, she knew an open helmet was bad, but couldn’t remember why it was open. She extended a dry, swollen tongue. The rain tasted like old socks, but she didn’t care.
Over the next few minutes, her memory returned in shreds and flickers. When she recalled the attack and the crash, she opened her eyes and jerked upright.
“Ian!”
The effort produced very little sound and much agony, but she fought it and focused on Ian long enough to look around. She sat in a muddy patch of Fozzy grass. It was more a tall, fuzzy fern than actual grass, but it seemed to cover most of the ground in this world. The big herd animals surrounded her on all sides, their lamprey-like mouths pressed to the ground as they grazed. An underlying sound, like a thousand snorting horses, filled the air, punctuated by the occasional meowing sound; so familiar, yet vastly different from the herds on Earth. Oddly enough, the accompanying smell was not unpleasant, but sweet and rich, like a baking cake.
The little hooked monsters crawled all over Umma and the surrounding ground, with the tiny lice crawling over everything in between. She started brushing at her face and pounding on her arms, slapping them wherever she saw a patch. Her gasping triggered a coughing fit, which produced sputum filled with the white parasites. The sight and realization repulsed her. She must be filled with them, just like Ian.
Panic seized her. She started screaming, clawing and slapping at the things on her face. The pain flared and increased until she couldn’t breathe. She fell into a heaving lump, rolled on her side and vomited.
After lying still for a while, the newly-inflicted pain went away. Almost as if it had been a punishment. She checked her suit’s power level. The batteries were nearly drained. She considered turning it on, just long enough to dispense the pain killing drugs, but she feared she or Ian might need them more later.
Lying in the grass, staring at pale blue sky between thinning clouds - a sight that wasn’t in the least bit alien - the truth came to her suddenly, like a stab in the heart. If the crew in the lander could help, they would already have arrived.
Even switched off, her suit would notify her if she had incoming radio calls. It had detected none while she’d slept.
A frogvark plopped down next to the opening in her helmet and she got her first look at one up close. Between the pointy beak and the big jumping legs were six small limbs, three per side, ending in the tiny, sharp claws they used to cling to their hosts.
It scratched and scrambled for a grip on her rain-slick helmet, then hunkered down and opened gill-like flaps on its sides. The little white things filed out in long, snaking lines, like sightseers from a passenger shuttle, and streamed into her helmet.
She, Rachel and Ian had watched nearly thirty hours of early probe video footage showing the frogvarks, the herd beasts and the lice. There had been long, rambling discussions about the strange and complex symbiotic relationships between the local animal species, yet none of them had clocked the tiny parasite’s aggressive tendencies.
With a shiver, she brushed the frogvark off. Pain washed over her again, making her gasp and squirm, but she refused to give in. She thought about her daughter, now twenty. Rachel was a self-sufficient adult, but she still needed her parents. Umma had to live, for Rachel, and for Ian.
The torment subsided after a few seconds and another jumper arrived. She let this one unload in peace and tried to observe as much as she could. Her survival - and possibly Ian’s - might depend on it.
As the sun crept higher and the mist burned away, Umma gently detached as many frogvarks as possible, then stood up on wobbly legs. The herd spread out in every direction, a living sea, perfectly adapted to a prairie world. The big animals processed the grasses and, in doing so, produced food for the other organisms. Ian had always wondered why they had seen so few large species on this world. Umma thought that maybe they had just not been needed, that the ecological niches were filled so well the other species had either died out or been killed off.
A frogvark carpet covered each beast, some crawling around, some tightly attached with sharp beaks buried in their hosts, others arriving or leaving, bound for other nearby animals. The hustle and bustle resembled the spaceport the day they had departed Earth.
As if they’d been waiting for Umma to rise, the herd began moving all at once. She dodged them, at first worried that the lumbering monsters would crush her, but the herd parted and moved around her, as if she were a rock in a stream. On stiff, sore legs and fully feeling this world’s extra gravity, she moved against the flow, hoping to get clear and start searching for Ian.
This time the pain came in a flash that took her breath, but only affected her front side. The harder she tried to move forward, the more intense the fire. She stopped and took a step backward and the pain lessened, then started in her right side. She moved away from the pain, in the same direction as the herd, and the sensation went away. When she stopped moving it started again, this time in her back, pushing her forward. The little bastards were driving her!
A chime sounded inside her helmet, announcing an incoming radio communication. Her heart leapt into her throat. With trembling hands she powered up the suit.
“Come in Cochran! Can you read me?”
“Umma? Are you there?”
She recognized the voice - Ian’s AI.
“Scooby! Where are you?”
“I’m with Ian. He’s alive but I can’t communicate with him. His suit power is off, his visor is open. But I can’t get close enough to dock with his helmet. Can you help?”
Ian was alive! She felt suddenly stronger and determined.
“Where is he?”
“On the ground, still attached to the flier. We’re surrounded by a large herd that just started moving.”
“According to the directional finder, you are about six hundred yards toward the rear of the herd. Fly straight up and flash your strobe.”
She strained her eyes, until she saw a bright pinprick flash in the distance.
“I see you. Stay there and keep flashing. My suit batteries are low, so I’m going to shut it down, but I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
“I’ll flash once per minute. Please hurry. I’m worried about Ian.”
She waited for another flash, then started toward it. The pain in her front grew steadily until she couldn’t stand it. She stopped, gasping, with tears trickling down her cheeks, but refused to go in the direction they demanded. Instead, she turned and started walking sideways, making them shift their pain. It amazed her how quickly the little monsters could communicate. In order to inflict such instant and wide-spread discipline, they must work in concert and do it quickly.
She continued this strategy, expecting any minute to feel the body-warping agony she knew they could produce, but it never came. At some point the herd stopped and young centipede beasts - some only waist high - moved to block her path. With patience and determination, she moved around and between them, her forward progress slowed, but she refused to stop.
They tried a different tack. The frogvarks swarmed, covering her until their added weight began to drag her down. She stopped to rest every few minutes, but kept going. Then a herd beast picked her up with its soft, fleshy maw and carried her for nearly an hour, oblivious to her pounding. When it finally set her down, she immediately continued her trek.
She had just skirted a stand of swampy water filled with dense, woody reeds when she saw the flier less than a hundred yards away. Scooby came down closer. Frogvarks immediately started jumping, trying to reach him, but he stayed well out of range and sent her another message. She powered up her suit.<
br />
“I established contact with Porky on the Cochran twenty-one minutes ago. He says his charge, Maggie Torres, is still alive but comatose. He needs your help to get her into the MockDoc vat.”
Umma’s throat tightened as the statement sank in. What did he mean by ‘still alive’? And why would Porky need Umma’s help to get Maggie into the AI medical unit? “Get a status on the rest of the crew, Scooby.”
“He says they’re all dead. Three died from trauma induced by parasitic infestation, which caused an encephalitis-like condition. Four suffered heart failure and two bled to death.”
Umma fought back the tears and panic. With a renewed sense of urgency, she hurried the last thirty yards to Ian.
She found him next to the smashed flier, tangled in his tether. He was pale. His eyes twitched beneath the lids. Blood trickled from his nose. She touched his cheek with trembling hands and his eyes opened. The pupils weren’t evenly dilated. One looked milky and bruised. He mumbled.
“It’s me, sweetie. It’s Umma. Can you hear me?”
He licked his lips and spoke with a raspy, shallow voice. “Hey, darlin’”
“Thank God. Just hang on, sweetie, and we’ll get you back to the ship.”
“I came all this way … to see alien critters and I’m missin’ it.”
She stroked his face and said, “There’ll be plenty of time later.”
“Don’t kill them. They didn’t know.” Then he closed his eyes and mumbled again. “- born for this.”
She picked up his gloved hand with both of hers and held it against her cheek, but he had dropped into unconsciousness.
“We have an audience,” Scooby said.
The hair on her neck prickled when she looked up. Herd beasts were arrayed around them in a neat ring. The big animals, and every frogvark attached to them, turned their ‘faces’ toward Umma. And the big animals did have something akin to a face, a wide flat spot, near the ground, just above the mouth, where three round depressions covered with soft skin vibrated like drums.
They were quiet. All the beasts had stopped eating. Even the young ones were still, and peered placidly from between the adults.
Scooby said, “MockDoc wants to talk with you. He says he helped Porky kill the parasites in Maggie.”
Hope flared in her again. She glanced in the direction of the Cochran but could see only grazing herd animals. She forced patience and settled down in the grass next to Ian. “Stay above me and relay the conversation, Scooby. I don’t want to waste my power. Ask him what he did.”
“He says each of the adult lice carries a tiny crystal under its carapace. Through testing, he found the sonic frequency for making the crystals vibrate. He had hoped to drive them out of Maggie, but it killed them instantly.”
“That’s good news,” Umma said. “We can finally fight back.”
“He says we can’t kill those infesting you or Ian. It will leave your bodies filled with millions of lice carcasses, which will cause infections throughout your systems. Ian would not survive it and your chances would be very slim. He doesn’t expect Maggie to last long now.”
Umma cursed under her breath and looked around at the herd again. They seemed to be waiting for her. If it was her move, then she would sure as hell make one. She left Ian long enough to collect several stout, woody reeds. With the knife and carbon wire from her field kit, she started building a travois.
“Tell Doc and the other AIs to come up with some way to drive these things out without killing us. We have hundreds of years of human technology at our disposal; surely they can come up with something. Try chemicals, temperature extremes, anything. In the meantime, I’m bringing Ian back to the ship.”
When Umma started forward with the travois, her tormentors tried driving her with pain again, but she employed the same tactics of turning the other cheek, a difficult task while pulling Ian. Several times, she was forced to stop entirely when they visited her entire body with pain. Still, after each episode, she kept moving toward the ship. It was slow, exhausting and agonizing, but once they cleared the leading edge of the herd she could see the Cochran in the distance, easily the tallest thing on the horizon. It buoyed her determination and picked up her pace. The herd followed close behind, but Umma was finally calling the shots.
“Umma! Check Ian.”
She stopped and lowered the travois handles. Ian was writhing and twisting against the tether she’d used to secure him to the frame. He uttered whimpers and grunts. When she knelt next to him, he immediately stopped, relaxing back into unconsciousness.
She looked up at Scooby, still flying above and ahead of her, out of frogvark range. “He doesn’t look good. Anything new from Doc?”
“No,” he answered. “But I think we need to hurry.”
“I know,” she said, and picked up the handles again. The instant she did, Ian groaned and twisted in pain. She put the travois down and he relaxed.
“The little fuckers are using Ian to control me!”
She paced, circling Ian, muttering and cursing under her breath. The herd waited; the large animals grazed and ignored her again, but frogvarks continued to arrive and depart. Seeing the ship so close made her frustration even greater. All kinds of crazy ideas roared through her exhausted mind, but nothing sane enough to try.
Scooby came down close to her head, easily within attack range, but this time the frogvarks ignored him. “You just said they’re using Ian to manipulate you. Do you realize what that implies? Their making that kind of connection between you and Ian shows an amazing degree of sentience. Animals are not capable of such abstract ideas.”
“Of course they’re intelligent,” she said, brushing frogvarks aside so she could sit on the ground next to Ian. “ And they’re being deliberately evil. That’s even worse.”
“Perhaps you just don’t understand their motives.”
She ignored him and watched the lice move up and down Ian’s chest in clumps and long, snaking lines. They were organized and they communicated en masse almost instantaneously. Did they have psychic abilities? A network? What of the crystals Porky had discovered?
“Scooby? Do you think the lice could communicate via a kind of radio signal using those crystals? Maybe some kind of vast distributed network?”
“It’s possible. There’s a low-level static that dominates the lower frequency range here.”
Umma groaned in response to her sore muscles and joints as she struggled back to her feet. “Can you create a jamming signal? Or better yet, a directional EMP blast?”
“I don’t have the power to generate an EMP, but the Cochran has the materials needed to build a device. Jamming I can do. Finding the right frequency might take a while, but I could just start at one end and cycle every second until we find something or run out of spectrum. It will be power intensive, so I may have to do it in stages.”
“If they do communicate and coordinate via radio signals, do you think disrupting that would kill them? I don’t want the same situation as MockDoc’s sonic experiment.”
“Seems unlikely, but I don’t know. You’re the biologist.”
Umma looked around at the herd and the distant Cochran, then down at Ian. “Do it. We have to do something, and we don’t seem to be making much progress by just standing here.”
Scooby positioned himself out of range, but above Umma and Ian, emitting a low-level hum. His power light immediately flickered red. He dipped a little lower as he stole power from his fans, but he didn’t stop. Nothing happened for several minutes, then in the blink of an eye she felt millions of pinpricks inside and outside her body. Black spots filled her vision and she dropped to her knees. Her lungs constricted. Her throat and nose burned, making her cough and retch. Clear drool, mixed with red and white swirls, dripped from her open mouth as she gasped for breath. Then it ended as quickly as it had started.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Scooby said. “They communicate on a higher frequency than I would’ve thought.”
Umma
was gasping, trying to get back onto her feet, but she noticed the lice on her arms milling in confused circles. Individuals, almost too small to focus on, looked like tiny drunks, staggering around and bumping into each other. It made her smile.
“Take that, you little bastards,” she mumbled, and brushed them off without the punishing pain. Then, even as she looked around at the surrounding chaos - confused herd beasts, panicked frogvarks and disorganized lice - she realized it had failed. The tiny parasites had lost their cohesive organization, but the majority she hosted had not left her body.
Taking advantage of the pandemonium, Scooby swooped down and docked with Ian’s helmet. The visor immediately closed and the suit’s power came on. Then Ian and the attached travois bounced. At first Umma didn’t realize what she was seeing. Scooby’s power light blinked red and as soon as it turned green, Ian bounced again - automated defibrillation via his field suit.
“Ian!” She dropped to her knees next to him and tried to open the visor.
“Don’t touch him!” Scooby said, then added “Clear!”
Ian jumped again.
The process repeated three more times, leaving Scooby’s status lights dark after the final attempt. Lice crawled all over the AI’s shell.
“Scooby?” She detached the motionless AI from Ian’s helmet and set it aside, then opened Ian’s visor. His eyes were closed and his expression calm. He was as still as sculpted stone.
She yanked her helmet off and pressed her face to his. Twenty-one years of memories welled in her; the day they met, the first night they spent together, those quiet afternoons napping, their daughter, the dinners, the friends, the plans.
“Ian. Please don’t leave me.” Her chest and throat felt crushed - she could barely breathe - but the tears wouldn’t come. Lice patches, obviously having reorganized, covered her husband and large numbers were clustered around the travois joints she had wired together. Seeing them infuriated her. When the herd came close - watching - it was suddenly all too much.
“You fucking monsters,” she screamed. The loud noise affected them like a pressure wave; they all jerked back at once. With rage-fueled strength she pulled a reed loose from the rattletrap travois and swung it like a Louisville Slugger, striking a lead beast square in the face. She wheeled, batted and pounded, crushing thirty or forty frogvarks before her strength failed and she slumped to the ground.
