Scorched Earth Read online

  Odd sensations streamed into him, some hybrid of the connection provided by the vines and the efforts of his implant. He reached out tentatively, trying to figure out just what/where he was, trying and rejecting analogies and metaphors until he found one that fit. As best as he could comprehend it he was almost an extension of the ship—or it was an extension of him. He couldn’t tell. He focused on the vines, and ordered them to release him. Nothing happened. He could see them, he could almost feel them as they held Duke and him fast, but they wouldn’t respond to his commands. Unlike the soldiers, it was as if they couldn’t understand what he was ordering them to do.

  “Hell, I’m being undone by the stupid ones,” he said.

  He cast around the ship, hoping there were any mobile plants left. He’d seen plenty of them back on Vasquez, taking readings and scuttling about on plant tasks that looked to have more to do with fieldwork than invasion. It was then he realized that, other than the boss plant, he hadn’t seen any mobile plants since he’d been aboard.

  “They’ve got to be somewhere.”

  Colby started projecting himself through the ship, taking a virtual tour. . . except, it wasn’t virtual. Part of him was actually traveling around the broken ship, noting the damage done by the cargo drone and poking into every compartment. Meanwhile, the rest of him was stuck inside the locker. It felt different than when he was controlling the soldier plants.

  He didn’t find any of the little, diagnostic plants hiding out, nor anything he could use to free himself. He found one compartment that reeked of potential, if that made sense. Literally, it was as if something pinged his brain about unnamed possibilities when he focused his awareness on that tiny section. But there was nothing there over which he could take control.

  When the first search turned up empty, he did it again. Still nada. The only thing that tickled his senses was the small compartment that felt like potential. And then it clicked.

  “Seeds!” he said. “They’ve got to be seeds! What else defines potential for a plant? If I can—” But the ramifications and his own reservations halted his words.

  Somewhere outside the ship, Marines were in battle with giant plants. Those plant warriors, not the smaller soldiers, were the problem, not the solution. More of them would only add more to the mess.

  Or would they? I could control the other soldiers. What if I can sprout new ones and then use them to fight?

  He didn’t consider how long it would take to grow new fighters to soldier-size. On Vasquez, it had taken over a day, but if he understood what Manny Sif had said, the daikaiju were growing at an exponential rate. Maybe he could get these to grow that fast, too. A little of Señor Fukimaru’s Wonder Grow went a long way back on his farm to increase yield, and there had to be an equivalent here on the ship that could do the same thing.

  You might have been a Marine general, but you’ve been a farmer for the last two years, for goodness’ sake. Just figure it out, Edson!

  Before he consciously decided to actually germinate the seeds, his mind was questing inside the compartment, and almost immediately, he recognized what had to be a nutrient feed system. He hesitated for only a moment before he tried to trip it. He might not have been able to control the vines holding him, but to his welcome surprise, the nutrient broth started to flow into the mass of seeds.

  Almost immediately, the seeds, well, stirred, as if waking up. He nervously monitored them, hoping he hadn’t a mistake. He might be compounding his initial sin of letting the plants onto New Mars.

  Within a minute, the seeds began to sprout, tiny green tendrils reaching out. Colby tried to reach them, but other than an itch in his mind that he couldn’t scratch, he didn’t feel a connection.

  Maybe they don’t have a developed enough whatever-they-had-for-a-brain yet.

  There had to be thousands of the seeds. As the green tendrils grew larger, longer, the new sprouts used them to start pulling themselves out of their separate bins and onto the deck. Within five minutes, five-centimeter-tall “starts,” to use farming terminology, were crawling out of the compartment and invading the rest of the ship.

  Colby couldn’t see any of them yet. His very limited field of vision was a little above waist height and only with a few degrees of arc. He wasn’t sure, for that matter, just how he was “seeing” any of this. He knew it was through the ship itself somehow, but he didn’t have a clue how that worked. But he could see it, and that was all that mattered for now.

  More of the starts poured out of the compartment. To Colby’s surprise, two of the immature plants started to bond to each other. For a moment it seemed they were fighting, like fetal sharks inside their mother’s womb, but then they merged, forming a single, larger plant. The newly formed double plant then sought two more merged plants, and within a minute, had combined into a single, still larger plant.

  The top of something green passed into Colby’s vision for a second and then was gone. A moment later, another appeared as the plants—he couldn’t call them starts any longer—continued their combinatorial dance.

  Two leafy arms reached up into the locker, gained purchase and pulled the body of a plant up to join him.

  “Stop, stop!” he yelled, focusing his effort.

  The plant barely hesitated. It pulled itself further into the locker, climbing the wall somehow, not touching him yet. Another followed it, then a third. Duke started snarling, but the plant paid no attention to the dog. Colby attempted to struggle, remembering how his neighbors, the Gustavsons, had been killed by the plant soldiers, how they had attacked him on the farm and in Blair de Staffney Station. He didn’t want to die trussed up like this. Striving to remain calm, he sent out waves of orders for the plants to leave the locker. He could feel them, better than when they were sprouts and starts, but he still couldn’t control them.

  The first plant reached out to touch one of the vines holding his leg. That vine went limp, almost swooned. It released Colby and started to merge with the larger plant. Other plants reached in, tendrils questing one by one for the vines that imprisoned him, and those vines released him as well. When one of the plants encircled his leg with a supple branch of an arm, Colby tried to jerk back, afraid that somehow, he’d be absorbed, too, but as if tasting him and finding him unworthy, the arm jerked back.

  The locker filled with writhing plants, their number decreasing as they grew from absorbing vine after vine. Duke started barking and wriggling beside him as each gripping vine let go in turn. Colby felt a final vine across his chest fall away. He sat up, pushing at the plants in his excitement to be free. With no more vines, they slid out of the locker, presumably to seek more fodder for mergers.

  Duke didn’t care why they were gone—she bolted from the locker with a yelp and out into the mass of smaller plants on the deck of the ship. She started jumping and spinning, crashing into them as she exulted in being free. The plants she knocked over ignored her antics and simply picked themselves back up. They looked identical to the ones that had invaded Vasquez, but they acted in a different manner.

  Colby had been filling in a picture of the alien species, and he was pretty sure that the boss plant controlled the others. If so, then was it possible that they had to be programmed or ordered to attack humans? Which meant that these plants, of which the boss had no knowledge, hadn’t received such orders yet. Did that mean he had an opportunity to program them? The larger they got, the more Colby began experiencing whispers of plant-thought, as if their brains were only now beginning to reach some critical mass needed to be controlled.

  But that still left the question of the plant boss. Colby had no doubt that cabbage-head was alive and out there, controlling whatever giant plant warriors were now attacking the Marines. Would the boss show up here and take over these plants? Colby vowed not to let that happen. Now he just had to figure out how to back up promises with deeds.

  Before he could do that, though, he had to get out of the ship. More than a dozen of the plants had grown to his chest-le
vel in height. A few seemed to be merging with the ship itself. He’d been able to control the plant soldiers when they were attacking the factory outside while he was trapped in the ship, then by the symmetric property of equality, he should be able to control those on the ship from outside of it.

  This wasn’t algebra, he knew, but he really had to get off the ship. Claustrophobia had him on the edge of a panic attack that he couldn’t currently afford.

  “Duke! Let’s go, girl,” he shouted.

  She barked what he assumed to be her assent. He started pushing his way through the unresisting plants towards the ship’s hatch, she darted under them, weaving her way between their stalks.

  The aft end of the ship had been heavily damaged by the cargo drone’s arms, and the ship had created temporary patches to stop the flow of air even after Colby had climbed into the locker. He hadn’t seen them before, more worried about breathing than in admiring a feat of biological engineering. As he watched, the obvious patches were fading. All around him plants were reaching up and being absorbed into the bulkhead, like so much vegetable wall putty.

  “Shit!” he said, wondering what was happening to the hatch itself. It had been a tight fit before just to get through it into the ship—he hoped it was still there. He couldn’t see it through the mob of plants pressing themselves against that part of the wall. He couldn’t even see Duke any more, and only knew her location when he she gave another yelp. Plants flew left and right and as Colby ducked down, he could see his dog shoving plants out of her way as she pushed her way to the open hatch. His heart dropped as he saw it already closing.

  “Wait, Duke!” he shouted, scrabbling forward on his hands and knees, but Duke, seeing sunshine, was not waiting for anything.

  She darted ahead and through the opening. Her passage through spurred the sphincter-like hatch to begin closing faster. With a burst of speed, Colby darted forward, following Duke’s example and sending plants flying. He could see the dog on the outside as she stopped and looked back at him, barking furiously.

  “I’m coming, girl!” he shouted, crawling as fast as he could, but in the best Hollybolly tradition, the opening kept shrinking, and in this case the hero didn’t make it. By the time he reached it, the opening wouldn’t have even accommodated a child. He stuck his hand through the hole, desperate to force it back open, but he couldn’t even slow it down. Duke licked his hand before he had to jerk it back for fear of being trapped—or worse, losing his arm.

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled in frustration, kicking out and scattering more of the smaller plants.

  Even among the plants from which he had torn limbs, they all ignored him. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t notice him if he started taking them all on. He leaned back against the bulkhead, letting his emotions drain away until his mind felt numb.

  Only, it wasn’t really numb. There was an incessant buzzing that he’d at first thought an actual sound before realizing his ears weren’t hearing any of it. He opened his mind, staring at one of the merged plants, this one about a meter-and-a-half tall. He imagined himself enveloping it, as he had with the plant soldiers in the factory, and he told it to stop.

  It did.

  Evidently, the plants had to grow large enough, or merge with enough others before their neural network could pick up commands.

  “Open the hatch!” he ordered it.

  Just as with the plant soldiers, he doubted they understood his words per se, responding instead to the underlying intention. Whatever the mechanism, the plant moved to the correct spot along the bulkhead and pressed up against it.

  And, of course, given his luck, nothing happened. The hatch did not reappear, and the bulkhead remained as featureless as before. Colby left the plant mindlessly striving to open a hole in the hull of the ship and shifted his attention deeper into the ship itself. He was just as attuned to the vessel as the individual plants, but he couldn’t control it. He could sense the capability just out of reach, but even with his interface, he lacked some critical piece that would allow him that connection.

  He could feel the ship growing all around him, changing in response to the plants he’d unleashed from seeds. More and more plants melded into the walls of the ship, emerging and continuing to grow on the outside, branches extending across the ground in all directions even as it enveloped the ship itself in ropy vines reminiscent of the ones that had held him prisoner. Following some blueprint he couldn’t fathom the ship began to transform. Finally only a few plants remained inside the ship’s compartment and these spaced themselves at even intervals from one another and began to sprout heavy branches, filling up more and more of the available space.

  The process wasn’t entirely comfortable. Colby felt as if he had gas, his stomach spasming as he explored the ship through his connection. It seemed as if the ship was no longer the central entity, as if the plants kept merging into a larger and larger form, one that had opted to incorporate the ship into itself. Somewhere in the process it had stopped being a ship that he was using to grow plants in.

  If it isn’t the ship, but another plant, can I control that?

  He reached out, the connection familiar and different but tenuous, like trying to understand Italian when all you spoke was Spanish. Before he could try to exert control, the ship lurched, throwing Colby backwards across the deck.

  Those branches were legs! This thing has become one of the giant plant monsters!

  Colby reached out to the plant itself, ignoring the capsule that was the ship, and he let his awareness flow into it. There was no disorientation as there had initially been with the plant soldiers. This was even more familiar than slipping into an old pair of shoes that knew his feet from long use. He’d done this a thousand times before, in a Republic Marine Corps battlesuit. It didn’t matter if a giant plant was really the same, or if his implant was translating the process into something his mind could comprehend. Those kinds of questions could wait until later. What mattered now was that he felt more in control than he’d been since leaving Vasquez. A few tentative impulses flickered over him, expressing a vague concern, or possibly opposition from the plant warrior around him, but it took no effort for Colby to squash them.

  With a simple mental flick, he was aware of what was outside of him. He was aware of a small golden dog biting a tiny corner of his leg. He was aware of combat in the distance, of Marines, almost all on foot, being attacked by thousands of suicidal plant soldiers. He was aware of three more giants much larger than the pair that had torn apart the launch cannon back on Vasquez. These plant warriors ignored the puny attempts by humans to stop them as they destroyed what he recognized as the governmental administration complex.

  “Sorry Duke,” he said as he stepped forward, careful not to accidentally fling the tiny dog aside. “Looks like I’m getting into the shit after all.”

  ***************

  Like a Norse Jötunn emerging from the earth, Colby stood up, towering over the shattered factories and cargo containers. It should have felt odd, but it didn’t. Perspective aside, the metaphor held. This was no different than donning a battlesuit. Muscle and nervous memory took over, and he strode forward. He didn’t have to “think” each tree-like leg in turn, no more so than he would to take a normal stroll—he wanted to move forward, and the legs took over.

  Despite his ability to control the giant plant, he had not been absorbed into it. He may have expanded his sense of self, but the core of who he was resided in the human body that slumped on the deck of what had been the alien ship. That body rolled at each lurching step. Much more of that and he’d awaken to a mass of bruises when all was done. He sent out a tentative command, and this time, the bulkheads of the ship obeyed, sending out several tendrils that delicately wrapped around his body, like the harness inside a battlesuit. With his physical body secure, he turned his attention back to the outside world. The process had taken only seconds.

  There were small eddies of green mist dotting the ground, like puddles after a r
ain. They stirred as he stepped into them, rising in swirls around his legs, attaching thousands of tiny potential-plants to him. He could feel the life force they contained, life force that translated into brute power. Colby knew without knowing how that it was power he could tap.

  His perception of distance skewed as he settled into his new height. Up ahead he could see the tops of three giant plants—daikaiju, he thought, recalling the term once more. They rampaged in what he knew to be Christiaan Huygens City, the capital of the planet. He didn’t have to see them, though, to know where to go. He could feel them, their presence shined like a beacon in his mind, the distance to them defined in terms of the number of strides he’d need to reach them. It didn’t have to make sense, it just was.

  Reflexes honed by endless hours in a battlesuit had him reaching through his implant to call up a targeting routine with the intention of painting the three giants and assigning a series of missiles to each once he locked on. His implant pinged back empty, unable to mesh with the software or access the requested armament because of course he wasn’t actually in his familiar battlesuit. The analogy only went so far. Colby would have to carry the battle to his foe the old fashioned way. Still, missiles would have been nice.

  He crushed immobile battlesuits as he strode along. He wasn’t trying to stomp on them, but there wasn’t much open space to place his huge feet, not if he wanted to take the most direct route and reach the fight ahead. He could sense firing, he could sense the battle, but couldn’t hear the sounds of the conflict. He briefly wondered if the plants even had hearing in the way that humans did. It didn’t matter. Whatever sensory capability came with his daikaiju was more than adequate to understand what was going on.

  With his mind wandering as to whether he could hear or not, he almost crushed a pocket of a dozen Marines who were being attacked by smaller plant soldiers. The Marines turned to face him, firing their puny weapons which were about as annoying as gnats to him—less annoying, in fact. Colby paused for a moment, taking the time to sweep a huge hand through the attacking plant soldiers, knocking them down like ten-pins. He grasped a handful as he resumed walking and tried to push them into his thigh, to absorb them. It didn’t work, so he let the mangled bodies fall to the ground as they released more spores.