Scorched Earth Read online

  It’s going to be hard for them to ignore this ship, though, and the dead broccoli man in the locker.

  “Four minutes,” his implant told him as he closed his eyes.

  He’d been up and running almost since the plant soldiers had attacked his farm. He didn’t know how long it would take the drone to get him to New Mars, didn’t know where the RS402 funnel was in relation to the planet in its orbit. Surely there’d be time to get some shut-eye once they were on their way.

  “One minute.”

  Heck, that seemed like five seconds.

  He knew he’d fallen asleep, so he opened his eyes, slid a protesting Duke off his lap, then stood up.

  “Plenty of time to sleep as soon as we’ve been grabbed, girl.”

  He waited for confirmation, his nerves stepping up a bit. There were thousands of the drones around New Mars at any given time handling the many shipments coming in from dozens of wormholes. Transponder codes indicated which were to be sent down to the planet’s surface to one of many depots for handling and processing, and which had to be rerouted on to one of the many other wormholes for the next stage of their journeys across space. A hundred AI traffic controllers routed ships from ingress to egress with rarely an exception that had business down on New Mars itself.

  A jolt well beyond the capacity of the ship’s dampeners staggered Colby and knocked Duke off her feet.

  What the hell?

  Most of the cargo arriving from Vasquez was agricultural, but some of the specialty foods were easy to bruise. He couldn’t imagine that the cargo pods would be manhandled like that. Another jolt almost sent him to the floor, and from behind him, Colby heard a sound no one in space ever wants to hear: a hissing.

  All of the vines connected to the bulkheads lifted up in unison.

  Colby spun around, trying to pinpoint the hissing, but it wasn’t in the bridge.

  “Stay here, girl!” he shouted, bolting for the passage leading to the ship’s rear. The hissing grew louder, and he could feel the movement of air. And then he saw it. The tip of a ceralloy blade had cut into the ship. Air whistled around it.

  Tiny, overlapping, green scales flowed along the ship’s walls trying to seal around the puncture, some kind of automated algae that struggled to coat the cargo drone’s arms and immobilize them. They failed when, as if shifting its grip, the prong moved, making the hole a little larger. What had been a soft hissing became a roar, pulling at Colby. If the drone’s grasping arm moved again, there would be an explosive decompression.

  “Duke!”

  Colby turned and ran back, fighting the rush of air. Duke was whining, her voice sounding tinny as the air became thinner. She ran up to him, trying to jump into his arms.

  Even without a catastrophic evacuation, he knew his time was limited. He had a minute, maybe a little more, to figure their way out of this mess. The ship jolted again, almost knocking him down.

  The locker!

  Colby grabbed the struggling Duke, then dragged her to the locker. If he could get inside and close it, then he’d at least have that much O2 to breathe, which was a heck of a lot better than trying to breathe vacuum.

  He hit the door release three, four times, as dark spots danced across his vision. Finally, the door opened. There wasn’t enough room for him and Duke with the alien’s body there. He put Duke down, then yanked the body with all his might, pulling it out, tearing it free of the vines that had held it and flailed to continue in that purpose. Gasping, he fell on his ass in the process, the plant carcass sprawled on top of him. He lay there a moment dazed.

  Get with it, Edson!

  He pushed the body off him, then grabbed Duke by the scruff her neck[Dr. Jim1] and threw her into the locker. He pulled the boss plant’s severed head out and tossed it to the deck, then jumped in, pushing Duke to the back.

  “Close, damn you!” he gasped, punching every square centimeter near the opening.

  He was entering hypoxia. He recognized the signs: confusion, sweating, wheezing. If there’d been a reflective surface anywhere on this damn ship he didn’t doubt that it would show his skin color somewhere between blue and cherry red. Like all Marines, he’d undergone vacuum training, and as part of that, he’d been sent into never-never-land in a training chamber. He’d hoped he’d never feel that again.

  The ship lurched, more powerfully then before, and Colby was thrown and pinned against the back of the locker, face first in a mass of leafy vegetation. His body ached in a familiar way as gee forces reminded him of the difference between weight and mass. The ship was accelerating. His dog whimpered, though whether from her own hypoxia or the extra gees he couldn’t tell.

  “Sorry Duke,” he coughed, feeling her warm body at his feet. “The drone must be dragging us downward, for all the good it’ll do us.”

  She stopped whining and hugged him back, which made him feel good. They were going to go out together.

  She hugged me?

  He managed to turn despite the forces holding him to the wall. It wasn’t Duke. The same vines that had wrapped around the alien’s corpse had now latched onto to him and were holding him fast. He knew he should fight them, but he couldn’t. His mouth opened as he gasped for air, but there just wasn’t any. He straightened back up and feebly pushed at the opening, trying once more to close the door.

  And then he was out of energy. This was the end, he knew.

  Surprisingly, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t panicking. He felt a wave of lassitude sweep over him as he gave up.

  In his last moments, he started hallucinating. Sergeant Warshowki, his first DI, appeared, yelling at him to get up. Colby just giggled. The head of the alien scurried across the floor towards the control panels, dozens of tiny plant fingers having emerged from its neck to carry it along. He giggled again and his world went dark.

  Interlude I: Per Capita Perspective

  A frigid torpor gripped the Gardener, a lethargy it only understood as it broke through the edge of it like a questing root easing through clay soil. Bits of memory—glimpses somewhere between acquisition and true consolidation—taunted its awareness. Meat had entered its vessel. Meat with tools and weapons. They had attacked. Its attempt to neutralize the pair of primitives had failed and. . . one of them. . . severed its cranium from the ambulatory caudex it had fashioned rotations earlier. That accounted for both the disjuncture of memory and the torpor. The brutality of their incursion had shocked the Gardener into quiescence. Before it could recover, whether by design or random chance or simple Meat destiny, they had returned the pieces to the cold storage of the craft’s navigation locker where the waiting vines exuded much-needed and healing oxygen even as the lower temperatures slowed its restoration and pushed its awareness into oblivion.

  Until it hadn’t. Circumstances had altered, and quickly. Its recovering sensorium as yet possessed only limited visual processing, like seeing through a thick layer of unremitting cellulose, which coupled with the steady warming of its core was enough to recognize that it no longer lay within the alcove. A silhouette, possibly that of one of the Meat creatures, wrestled a smaller, quadruped form into the space, batting at the indiscriminate vines that sought to embrace them both.

  Audition returned and brought the whistle of escaping air. Escaping to where? Its elegant vessel rested comfortably in a forest clearing. And yet. . . as more and more of its cognitive processing came back to it, the Gardener understood. The vessel was not at rest, not on the planet at all, was in fact in space and damaged, possibly hulled.

  It strained and pushed at the ganglia bundle that had once connected it with a functional trunk and limbs. They descended from the slit just above the point of its neck wound, trembling as they adapted to serve as ambulatory roots. By whatever fluke, the Meat had managed to launch its ship into space. Necessity demanded it interface with controls, initiate repairs, and expunge the pests.

  The vessel jerked, rolling on an axis that should never have known rotation, and accelerated along a vector that was
impossible for it. The Gardener skittered across the floor, re-evaluating priorities and aiming itself toward one of the ship’s backup seed supply compartments along the edge of the far wall. The compartment served double duty as an emergency pod, existing to launch an assortment of supplies in the event of absolute catastrophe. Under such contingencies the Gardener’s own navigation pod could also launch as a life pod. As the rising cry of dwindling air demonstrated, the situation had reached that extreme, but there was insufficient time to eject the Meat from its escape route. Nor did it require such action. In its current form, the supply pod would serve.

  Pressing a root ganglion into the wall, it accessed the vessel’s systems to open a slit into its intended destination.

  The access was granted, but even as the Gardener slipped within an alien clamor reverberated through it. An outside force had accessed the vessel’s systems!

  «Impossible!«

  The system had been tainted, and yet the telltales of a Mechanical infestation were not present—which explained why the defenses it had crafted against such an attack had not activated. No, it was unthinkable. There was only Meat on the vessel. Meat did not possess the sophistication or technical savvy to communicate with spacecraft. And yet. . . as the Gardener communed with the vessel it had nurtured from a seed, it read the evidence that they had lifted from the planet’s surface, exited its gravity well, and passed through some spacial anomaly that had left it in an uncharted location before it had been attacked by a robotic tool of limited intellectual capacity.

  «Meat. Meat capable of space travel, capable of movement between stellar bodies. Impossible!»

  And yet. . . clearly possible. The Gardener compiled the horrifying ramifications, bracing itself against the cushioned sleeves of supplies making up the pod’s emergency seedbank. It abandoned any possibility of saving its vessel even as it abandoned the vessel itself. The greater need was to get away, determine its location, and get word back to its people. Meat was loose in the galaxy, with the full range and promise of ruination that Meat delivered on any world where it evolved.

  Indifferent to increased acceleration, it launched the newly purposed life pod, bringing its rudimentary navigation systems to life, relieved to find no taint of Meat present. Crude visual sensors showed the shattered shape of its once beautiful vessel gripped and pinched by a robotic tool that dragged it toward a distant mud-red sphere at speed.

  The Gardener consulted a manifest of its supplies and allowed itself a moment of relief. Assuming the planet wasn’t too distant, assuming it held even a modicum of friendly soil, it could grow the tools it would need, fashion a body appropriate to its demands, and do what had to be done.

  The desire to tend its own garden could wait. Meat, thinking Meat, threatened everything that set down roots or yearned for simple sunshine. That threat would be eliminated first and foremost.

  Part II: Home is Where They Have to Take You In

  A fractal of frames slowly formed in Colby’s mind. Each tiny image revealed a progression towards an immense facility of some sort, but from a slightly different perspective. Each frame moved independently from all of the others, in different vectors, spins, and rotations that weren’t limited to three dimensions. Colby knew it was a dream, but it still made him nauseous, and he thought he was going to lose the emergency rations he’d eaten with Topeka before leaving Vasquez.

  Two sounds started to register as well: a low moaning and a higher pitched whining. With his growing discomfort, it took a moment to realize that the moaning was coming from him. And that meant the whining was. . .

  Duke?

  He tried to reach out to her, but couldn’t move. A million hands conspired to restrain him. They held him back, keeping him from her for no purpose he could fathom. As a young lieutenant, he’d often had nightmares of being in an assault on an enemy position, with his Marines leading the way, only to feel as if he was trying to run through quicksand. He feared not being able to make it to the assault and being branded a coward, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not break free from the quicksand’s grip.

  Now, the same feeling of frustration and fear swept over him. Duke needed him, and he wasn’t able to get to her. The thousands of images, most of the fuzzily out-of-focus building, relentlessly pounded into his brain, too much for him to take. The dream demons were not going to let him comfort his dog.

  Even in his sleep, his body revolted. His stomach heaved, the acidic bile burning his throat. He wasn’t sure if he dream-vomited, or if it had been real. He struggled to turn his head, afraid of suffocating in his sleep, but his brain simply shut down, and he sunk back into the welcome embrace of oblivion.

  ***************

  Oblivion ended. Time resumed with little indication of how long it had been held in abeyance. As Colby started to resurface from the depths of darkness, the myriad of images appeared again. As before, most of them centered on a large structure, as if each was a feed created by a tiny camera on an independently operated bot of some sort. Like he was a security guard monitoring a building at night, but instead of 20 wall-mounted spy-eyes showing different areas in a building, he had thousands of aerial feeds, all showing the same thing, each from a slightly different angle or distance.

  The images themselves were odd, with deeper, more vivid colors in the blues and purples, with a lack of reds and yellows. Colby was familiar with the full range of military scanners, and the images reminded him of what ultra-violet surveillance gear produced.

  Nausea threatened him again, but he fought that back down. His mouth and throat still burned from before.

  Wait a minute. Did I really puke? Or am I back in the same dream?

  Colby had been subject to recurring dreams since his forced resignation from the Corps, but not like this. It was as if whatever he was dreaming before had just picked up where he’d left it. He didn’t understand what was going on, and it was hard to concentrate while being bombarded with sensory overload.

  Control yourself, Edson.

  The sheer number of inputs was overwhelming, but the overall concept of controlling different inputs was not anything new. As a leader of Marines, he’d had to manage individual inputs from his Marines as well as scanners and comms with higher headquarters. It had been difficult at first, even with only the thirty-nine Marines and corpsmen in his platoon. But with the help of his command implant and hours of practice, his mind learned how to make sense of everything. As he became more senior and had more Marines in his command, he’d increased his capacity for comprehension. But the thousands of inputs coming at him now was an order of magnitude more than he’d ever had to monitor before. And yet. . . once he’d awakened enough to understand what was happening—if not actually what he was receiving—it was clear that his unconscious mind had clued in sooner. Based on his familiarity with the general concept, it had begun rewiring the patterns of his synapses, rerouting the organization of the feeds so that, with the help of his implant, he started to have a sense of the overall picture.

  He was treating this as reality, not a dream, and that insight provided the final push, letting him focus on only a few inputs chosen at random, flicking from one subset to another and another. The building in the images had the Spartan look of a commercial processing center, like the—

  Hell, I’m on New Mars.

  It came rushing back to him. He’d taken the alien ship through the wormhole. The cargo drone had damaged the ship, and it had bled air. His last-ditch effort to save Duke and himself had worked, somehow, but while he was out cold, the drone had taken the ship to one of the planet’s processing centers, along with what were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of other cargo containers.

  Colby opened his eyes—to nothingness. He felt a moment of panic, but ironically, it was the onslaught of other images that kept him grounded. With a mental flipping of the switch, a trick he’d mastered over the years of battlesuit telemetry, he compartmentalized the inputs, shoving them to the side to focus on his own
senses. He still couldn’t see anything, but it was now simply darkness, not a loss of vision. Which in turn allowed him to register his other senses again.

  Nearby, Duke softly whined, and she struggled, pressing herself against his side.

  “Easy, girl. I’m here with you. It’s going to be OK.”

  She seemed to quiet down, but that could have been his imagination. What wasn’t his imagination was the itch that started to take over his senses, threatening to shut them down much as the visual inputs had before.

  Or maybe it was—he didn’t know. It didn’t matter if it was real or his imagination, it was driving him batty. It was as if a horde of cockroaches were crawling over him. He tried to lift his arm to scratch, which in turn reminded him that he was still being held fast.

  He heaved, struggling with all his strength, but while there was some give, he couldn’t manage any real movement. After two solid minutes of effort, he gave up. His body was still trying to make sense of everything, and he didn’t want to waste energy on a futile attempt to break free.

  “I’ve been immobilized and I’ve got who knows what being shot into my mind,” he said aloud, a technique he’d picked up when first learning to use his implant and feeds as a lieutenant.

  When faced with too much input, it helped to verbalize his thoughts. His voice was working fine, and as it had so many years ago, speaking allowed him to hone in on the specifics that defined a situation.

  “I’m on the ship, probably on New Mars. I’m getting feeds from somewhere, too many of them to handle.”

  The feeds started encroaching again, and he hurriedly continued, “Most of all, I’m still alive, so I can affect what is going on. First thing first is to figure out why I’m getting the feeds.”