The only sure way was to wait for it to move.
That was the other problem with shamblers. They didn't stay put.
If you spotted a shambler or a grove of shamblers, you had to be prepared to take them down when you saw them. You couldn't note their location and come back later. Three hours later, a shambler could be a half klick away-in any direction. A day later, as much as two klicks. In rugged country like this, it made any kind of a search difficult, if not impossible.
It didn't matter anyway. Even if we could cleanse an area, sweeping through it totally and burning everything that moved or even looked like it was thinking of moving, a week later there would be at least a dozen more shamblers moving ponderously through the same sector.
Dr. Zymph had a theory that the shamblers were in the process of developing migratory circuits and that if we could tag them, we'd see the whole pattern. General Wainright, who was in charge of this district, didn't believe in allowing any Chtorran creatures a chance to establish a biological foothold, and certainly not the chance to develop a whole migratory circuit. Dr. Zymph and General Wainright had had some glorious arguments. I'd witnessed two of them before I'd learned to stay close to an exit.
The military was growing increasingly antagonistic to the science branch. And vice versa. The military wanted to slash and burn. The science teams wanted to study. Myself-I was getting very schizophrenic. I could see both sides of the argument. I was a scientific advisor attached to the military, except when I was a soldier sent out on a scientific mission.
I could also see something else that disturbed me.
Three years ago, everybody was terrified of the Chtonran infestation, everybody was looking for ways to stop it; the essential priority was the development of weapons that would destroy the worms. Every scientist I met was interested in containment and control.
Now… the "domain of consciousness" had shifted. The worms had become "incorporated into our perceptual environment"-we were accepting the fact that they were here,, and with that acceptance, we were losing our commitment to resist, and instead, talking about ways to survive the inevitable takeover. I didn't like the shift in thinking that kind of talk represented. Next would be talk about ways for humans to "cooperate with the Chtorran ecology."
I'd already seen once how that kind of "cooperation" worked. It wasn't something I wanted to see again.
Absentmindedly, I checked my pulse. I was getting tense. I forced myself to sit back in my seat and did a quick breathing exercise. One apple pie with ice cream. Two banana splits with chocolate fudge. Three coconut cakes with pineapple topping. Four date-nut shakes with walnut flakes. Five-what goes good with e? Elephants. Five elephant burgers with rhinoceros relish… Six fragrant ferret farts. Seven great galloping garbage dumps. Eight horrible heaps of-never mind.
We rode deeper into the smell. Air-conditioning didn't help; it just made the smell colder. Oxygen hoods didn't help; they just enclosed you in a concentrated bag of it. Air fresheners didn't work; they just laid a new scent on top of the old one; the resulting mix was-incredible as it seemed-even worse than before. Someday, somebody was going to win a Nobel prize for inventing an olfactory science that could explain this mucus-blistering assault. That is, if anybody survived to hand out the prizes.
The worst part was that you didn't get used to it.
Now we were starting to see big purple patches of wormplant spreading across the crumpled slopes of the hills. They were fat with bright red wormberries, clustered in thick juicy-looking globules. They were edible, just barely-tart and sweet and sour all at the same time, kind of like cherries with sauerkraut; definitely an acquired taste. Unfortunately, the berries also carried the eggs of the stingfly. When they hatched in your belly-it had something to do with the exposure to stomach acids-the result would be a very uncomfortable case of maggots on the stomach.
The stingfly larvae clutched the stomach lining with very strong pincers or mandibles while they fed and grew. When they were large enough they'd let go, pass through the lower intestinal tract, cocoon themselves upon being exposed to air, and after a month or twelve, depending on the season, would hatch into a nasty little mosquito-like parent, ready to lay more eggs in the next patch of ripe worrnberries. Meanwhile, the wounds the maggots left in your stomach would very likely fester into ulcers. You could die from these ulcers; many already had. It was a slower and more painful death than being eaten by a full-size Chtorran, but every bit as effective. If I had my druthers, I'd druther be eaten by only one worm at a time, and not from the inside.
Meanwhile, there were agri-techs who were working on ways to make wormberries safe for human consumption; they were a great source of vitamin C and easier to cultivate than citrus trees. There were whole new industries being born in the wake of the Chtorran infestation. The Japanese had even found a way to make sushi out of the Chton-an gastropede-I'd heard it was as tasty as octopus, only a lot more chewy. They had also found that Chtorran oil was a superior substitute for whale oil; unfortunately there weren't enough Japanese to drive the Chtorrans into extinction as fast as they had done the cetaceans.
In the meantime, I wouldn't want to go walking across these hills in anything less than a tank. There would be millipedes in the underbrush; this time of year, they'd be feeding on the wormberries. They were attracted by the smell. I'd discovered that the hard way, five years ago at Camp Alpha Bravo in the Rocky Mountains. Apparently, the millipedes didn't mind a chronic case of maggots on the stomach-or maybe, considering the power of a millipede's stomach acids, the maggots didn't stand a chance. Who knew? There were too many questions that needed to be answered and not enough scientists.
Wherever there was a break in the sprawling wormplant cover, I could see the overall barrenness of the ground; but already, here and there, the first spidery patches of pink and blue iceplants were beginning to establish themselves. They were rootless wonders, feeding on anything they could, garbage, other plants, even industrial waste; whatever they happened to sprawl across. They lay flat against the ground, creeping in around the edges of thicker growths, scabrous and ugly webs of mottled ground.
Occasionally, Chtorran plants formed partnerships with the iceplant, but most ignored it as if it weren't there. Terran plants succumbed. Where the iceplant found a foothold, it grew and flourished, eventually becoming a fleshy mass of blue fingery tentacles. Where it couldn't flourish, it died-sort of.
Iceplants didn't just die-they shriveled and dried and flaked and blew away. Wherever a flake landed and found a profitable place to feed, a new iceplant began; it would survive until it too died and flaked away. You could burn the stuff away, but it always came back sooner or later.
The really bad news was that it was also a powerful hallucinogenic. Oh, hell, the entire Chtorran ecology was hallucinogenic. It was the stuff of which nightmares are made.
We rolled up and down, around and over. Mostly we tried to stay to the crests of the ridges; occasionally we dipped between them. Here the kudzu filled the darker hollows between the hills-filled and overflowed like a tide of blood. In some places, the scarlet ivy was already creeping toward the tops. Soon it would be a terrible glossy carpet, sprawling across everything, a bright stifling blanket, a plague of color and death.
The kudzu was the worst kind of enemy. You couldn't blow it up. Each fragment would try to reroot itself. You couldn't burn it out, because its roots would still survive. You couldn't poison its roots without doing more damage to the environment. General Armstrong H. Wainright would probably want to nuke it to hell and be done with it.
Suddenly: "Something up ahead-"
I punched the keyboard in front of me. My screens lit up to show the view from the aerial probes. The images bobbed and weaved. Three sweeps of spiders had been through this area, but hadn't reported any contacts.
"There it is."
The probes began to circle it slowly. It was unmistakable. "Be damned. I ain't never seen a dead one before."
"Is
that a worm, sir?"
"It was," I answered. "Just a baby."
"That's a baby! Shit-I used to drive a truck smaller than that."
"Everybody shut up. Smitty, do the probes show anything else?"
"No, sir."
"Is there any network coverage?"
"Sorry. This area hasn't been seeded with remotes yet."
"All right. Pull up close. Lopez, you and your team take samples. Use the remotes. I don't want anyone stepping outside unless they have to."
The worm had been as thick as a van and twice as long. The body was chewed and still oozing a syrupy black ichor. It had been attacked quite recently, and whatever had done this had been hungry. Only half of it remained.
"What do you think killed it, sir?"
I shrugged. "Something bigger and meaner."
"An Italian grandmother," put in Marano, the rear gunner.
I responded to that with a noncommittal grunt. "The only thing I ever saw tangle with a worm willingly was a full-grown grizzly bear, and the result was a pretty cross bear. You never heard such fancy cussin' in your life." I peered curiously at the screen, while I added, "The bear walked away with ruffled dignity, and the Chtorran was thoroughly confused. Food isn't supposed to fight back. Of course, it was a very small worm and a very large bear." Abruptly puzzled, I tapped the keyboard in front of me. "Smitty, are these colors accurate?"
"Yes, sir. Why?"
"The stripes. Some of them look white. I've never seen white stripes on a worm before. Lopez, try to get some of the white quills, if you can."
My headset beeped. "Captain?" It was Major Bellus again.
"Sir?"
"McCarthy, why are we stopped?" He sounded like he'd just been awakened.
"We found a specimen."
"Something new?"
"A dead worm. We're taking samples."
"Oh?" he said. His tone revealed his annoyance.
"It's important, sir. Something killed this worm and it wasn't us."
"It's your mission, Captain. I'm just here to learn."
"Yes, sir. Any other questions?"
"No. I'm sure you'll keep me briefed."
"Yes, sir." I clicked off. Bellus didn't like me, hadn't liked me since the moment he'd failed to return my first salute.
As far as I knew, nobody had ever found a dead worm before. We could kill them, but not like this. Humans turned worms into blackened rubbery lumps, charred and smoking. This reeking mess was a bad omen. What fed on worms? Nothing that I'd ever heard of. This kind of puzzle had nasty teeth in it. You could ignore it, drive on by, and ten minutes later something would come charging up behind you and bite you in the ass. Considering the size of the bites, I didn't want to take the risk.
"Lopez, you done?"
"Just finishing now, sir. We're bringing the units home."
"Smitty? Anything on the screens?"
"No, sir."
"Okay, pop the hatch. I'm going to take a quick look around."
Close up, the worm smelled as bad as it looked-and in the flesh, it looked a lot worse than on the screens. Worms didn't usually stink like this. Normally, they had a soft, red, minty flavor, almost pleasant. This was the same smell turned putrid. An olfactory nightmare. This worm looked like it hadn't just been eaten, it looked like it had been jellied. I thought about spiders, nature's perfect little vampires; they injected the victim with enzymes that both paralyzed and liquefied, they waited until the critter's internals turned to custard, then they sucked it out. Nasty and efficient. I wondered if something had done the same thing to this worm.
It couldn't have been a spider, Chtorran or otherwise. The only spiders big enough for this kind of prey were the ones McDonnell Douglas had built for the North American Authority-and they didn't bite. They flamed. There were fifty of them patrolling the northern territory of the now-reunited Mexico; if any of them had run into anything unusual, it would have signaled.
The size of the bites puzzled me. A large predator would have ripped off strips of flesh. These bites were disproportionately neat and clear, as if someone or something had applied a grinder directly to the surface of the worm and just chewed it away. Whatever it was, it had only wanted access to the soft rubbery inside of the worm; once the holes had been opened, it left a lot of the skin intact.
Whatever it was, it was gone now. There were only stingflies and carrion bees feeding here. The sound of their incessant droning had a grating edge. The air hummed annoyingly. I knew they couldn't get under the hood of my jumpsuit, but just knowing they were out there made me feel naked and uncomfortable.
Abruptly, part of the puzzle clicked. The carrion bees. I glanced around quickly, then headed back to the rollagon at a run. "Seal the hatch," I ordered before I was even halfway in. It popped shut behind me so fast, it slapped me in the back.
"What was it? What'd you see?" Smitty asked nervously.
"Nothing. If I'd seen anything, it would have been too late."
"You know what did this, don't you?"
I shook my head. "No. Not specifically; but if I had to guess-" I pulled my hood off so I could splash my face with water from my canteen: "Those weren't big bites, they were little ones. Hundreds of thousands of little ones. That worm got hit by a swarm of something; it attacked, it fed, and…" I shrugged. "Now it's probably gone back to its nest-or whatever."
Lopez looked up from the screen of her microscope. "A swarm of something-?"
"Maybe it's something that we've seen before. We just haven't seen it do this." I was already dictating to the computer. "Check for all creatures that eat like spiders, things that poison their victims and liquefy their insides. It doesn't have to be big. We're looking for an effect that would be magnified if the creature fed in a swarm-but maybe it doesn't swarm all the time. Also consider nonswarming creatures that periodically come together." Abruptly, I had another thought. "Is it possible that a millipede swarm could overpower a worm?" I had to smile at that. It would be poetic justice. The worms ate millipedes like popcorn.
A cross-match on the juices found in the tissue samples would probably tell us what we needed to know. The tank's lab wasn't exhaustive, but Lopez was good. She'd made accurate determinations with samples of much worse quality.
"Sir?" That was Smitty. "Do we go on?"
"Huh-? Oh, of course." And then I realized what he was asking. "I don't think General Tirelli would be very happy with us if we turned around just because we saw a dead worm."
"It's not the worm I'm worried about, Captain. Check your screen please."
I tapped the keyboard in front of me, resetting the large screen in the center back to general surveillance. A giant pink fluffball the size of a Saint Bernard floated and bounced and rolled across the broken land in front of us.
Right, Fluffball day. When all the spores exploded at once, it would trigger a three-day feeding frenzy.
The eggs of all the things that fed on the spores would hatch at the same time. And then the eggs of all the creepy crawlies that fed on them. And then the eggs of all the larger creepy crawlies that fed on the little creepy crawlies would hatch, and so on, all the way up the food chain, until even the worms would come out and gorge themselves. I knew from personal experience that General Tirelli would understand this.
"Is there anything on the weather map? Satellite scan? Network? Probes? Skybirds?"
"No, sir."
"Maybe it's a rogue fluffball," I said. "Or maybe his calendar is off. Or maybe he's lonely and looking for friends, I dunno." I rubbed my cheek thoughtfully. I really hated decisions like this. I sighed with annoyance and double-checked the route map on screen two.
Right. We were headed into the reddest part of the map. I reached for my headset.
If you were to look at a map of the Earth, with overlays representing all of the different constituents of the Chtorran infestation, showing every manifestation of their progress, where all the myriad species have spread, where they have settled and where they have been sighte
d, or even simply where residual traces of Chtorran activity have been reliably identified, the map would clearly demonstrate that there is no longer any place on this Earth that may be presumed uncontaminated.
It is important to note that no specific area of contamination exists as a single wash of biological homogeneity, but instead as a collage of many separate and distinct infestations, each one varying in components, scope, and impact; but all of them spreading, changing, interacting, and overlapping; each an element of a much larger process.
In most locales, the infestation still presents itself mildly, almost benignly, a factor that has misled many to presume that the magnitude of the disaster confronting us is far less than has been claimed.
If all that the casual observer sees is only the occasional odd interloper, then the assumptions of his ignorance may be understandable; but even the experienced observer is likely to underestimate the situation when the only evidence of the Chtorran presence available to him is nothing more immediate than a few tufts of velvet floss or some isolated clusters of blue iceplant. The undeniable fact is that the scale of this infestation is incomprehensible when perceived on the local level.
When perceived globally, of course, the scale of the infestation is crushing.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 2
A Walk in the Park
"There's one thing to be said for ignorance. It starts a lot of interesting arguments. "
-SOLOMON SHORT
The major didn't want to hear about it. He wouldn't even listen to my reasons for concern. "Your orders, Captain, were to reconnoiter the area, weren't they?"
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