Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (45 page)

“Hmm.
Okay. I’ll speculate then. How’s that?” she offered and swallowed. Maybe it
would be good just to get this off her shoulders and give the burden of these
horrid creatures to someone with a lot of guns and explosives to carry for a
while.

“Sounds
perfect,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“I can’t
tell too much from the few archeological examples we have, obviously, but there
are some clues in the artifacts.”

“Go,” he
said.

“First of
all, I don’t think there are many of them. I could be off about this, but I
just don’t get the sense of unbridled proliferation at work when I think about
them. I see them cloistered in several locations on the planet, not thousands.
If I had to guess, I’d say there are maybe a thousand, possibly two thousand
individuals’ total. That comes from the fact that I see no evidence of younger
or immature examples in the remains in the monolith.”

“Okay.
That could be encouraging,” he said.

“They are
probably long-lived,” she went on.
 
“Perhaps hundreds of years old at maturity.”

“Where
does that come from?”

“I’ve
examined the bone structure of a couple of the mummified examples we found in
the monolith. The bones are slight, weak, but the joints are simply old. The
calcification buildup and wear on the cusps suggest great age.”
 
She stopped and thought for a second. “They
think differently than we do,” she said changing direction. “Their technology
suggests some kind of duality of mind. That’s the only way I can put it.”

“What do
you mean?”

“I mean
they have successfully created a technology capable of interplanetary travel,
which depends on what we would think of as a normal approach to discovery
around physics and physical laws, yet they’ve spent half their time studying
living things and turning the manipulation of organic material into a fantastic
technology, and then somehow blended physics and biology together. To us, the
idea of blending physics and biology into a single technological framework is
unfathomable. We just assume it can’t be done.”

“So they
don’t think like we do?” Paul asked, repeating back the best he could
understand of Rachel's sophisticated knowledge.

“Just as
I said,” she smiled. “They seem to be a lot smarter than we are, but they’re
also very stupid in some ways.
 
They are
great integrators, but the simple stuff eludes them.”

“Like
stupid how?”

“Well,
consider for a moment their choice of weapons,” she said, knowing that the
question would pique his attention. “They spend generations upon generations
developing a biological weapon that, as effective as it is, is not nearly as
destructive as a simple bomb.”

“But from
what you described,” Paul said with a thoughtful frown, “their weapon targets
only their enemies with little or no collateral damage. Sounds like a good
weapon to have in your arsenal.”

“Yes.
That’s true. We, on the other hand, if we could find them, could wipe them out
with just a few nukes. Sure, we’d leave craters the size of a city in the
jungle and kill everything for kilometers all around, but they’d be dead. That
would be our goal. I don’t think the idea of using a bomb is something they
would think of as a rational thought.”

“How do
you know they don’t have a nuke or two waiting for us?”

“Because
they didn’t use it,” Rachel said flatly. “It’s almost as if the biological
precision of the wasps is somehow a cultural imperative, and that killing only
a ‘bad’ species is permitted.”
 
She
paused and ran her hand over her eyes and back over her head. “Look, I’m a
biologist. I understand how important each species in any ecosystem is to the
whole. They do, too. But for them it’s like they…they take it to the next
level. They understand so much more about how the pieces fit together in an
ecosystem than we do. So, like I said, they’re smarter than we are—and dumber,
too.”
 
She shook her head ruefully. “At
the same time, they’ll take individual representatives of any species and cut
it up, blend it with, amalgamate it, morph it with and stitch it to any other
species just to see what happens. I think they do that just to see what use
they can make out of the new little monster they’ve created. Unlike Erlich and
his little team, they really know how to use that blending technology. They
invented it.”

That was
the part she didn’t understand. That was the thing that churned inside her and
gave her the nightmares. That was the thing that was wrong.

“So you
haven’t told me what kind of threat you think they are to the colony,” Paul
said cocking his head.

She
swallowed and put aside the thoughts of the hideous artifacts she’d found in
the monolith. “In the short term,” she went on. “I doubt they’re much of a
threat. I think they used the most effective weapon they have against us, and
it worked—it killed most of us off. That weapon can’t be used again as I
understand it. I doubt they have anything like an infantry or air force or
tanks or guns.
 
They may have other
biological devices you might call weapons available, but my suspicion is that
they they’ve used their most destructive one on us already. And for all we
know, they may be perfectly happy with the result.”

“What do
you mean?” Paul asked.

“It’s
like I said in the meeting,” she said. “Our numbers are so low now that we
probably won’t survive as a species. My guess is that they think they’ve won
the war already. All they have to do is sit back and wait for the last one of
us to die. The planet itself will kill us. They know this entire system inside
and out. So they must know that, too. It’s just a matter of time.”

Paul
nodded, his eyes narrowing just slightly.

“That
brings me to the last thing about them I think,” she said.

“What’s
that?” he asked.

“Patience.
They are extremely old—and extremely patient.”

“From what
you’ve said it doesn’t sound like they’re much of threat,” he said.

“We’ll be
lucky even to see one of them,” she said, desperately hoping it was true.

* * *

Donna held
up the vial of clear liquid, pushed it through the bars a few inches and
swished it around so Smith could see it. “Know what this is?” she asked him,
her eye blazing.

“New
sweetener you’ve invented?” Smith asked sardonically.

“Not
quite,” she said. “If I have my way, I’ll be the one to pour this shit over
your heads.”

Wethers
and Lindstrom were sitting side by side against the far wall, and were not
quite as nonplused as Smith. Wethers couldn’t quite take his eyes off the vial
of Villaroos plant extract. Lindstrom gave his fear away by deliberately not
looking at the plant extract.

“I
suppose you’d enjoy that,” Smith said.

“No more
so than your boys there enjoyed throwing me into the jungle from a shuttle,”
she laughed. “That was fun wasn’t it, Wethers? You both must have loved doing
it, ‘cuz you were smiling about it quite a bit as I recall.”
 
She swished the vial as she spoke. “You know
when you kicked me off the force field, Lindstrom, you must have broken one of
my ribs. I still can’t take a deep breath without feeling it.”
 
Her fingers found the spot on her side and
massaged it. “Yep. Still hurts. Imagine what it’s like to be reminded how much
I hate you every time I breathe.”

She
leaned back in the chair. “You sonsofbitches…” she said, shaking her head
slowly and beaming wickedly. “Aren’t you just surprised as hell to see me? I
can’t imagine what it must feel like to be you, looking at me. In a way I feel
sorry for you.”

“If our
roles had been reversed,” Smith said, “you might have done the same. Your
actions right now only confirm it.”

“You
know, I can’t argue with you there,” Donna said. “And now look, I get the
chance to be you with three sonsofbitches like you to get revenge on. Feels
nice, actually.”
 

She
uncapped the bottle of liquid, raised it to her mouth and took a big drink of
it. She held it in her mouth with twisted glee, then pissed it out of her mouth
in a long, thin stream from Smith to Wethers. She ran out before getting to
Lindstrom.
 
“Got lucky there, Lindstrom,
no Villaroos juice for you today. It’s just water, you stupid bastards,” she
said and got up. “This time … but I’m working your case every day, so don’t
worry. I’ll see that you get what you deserve. That’s a promise.”

She put
back the chair and walked out of the brig. On her way out she thanked the guard
at the entrance. “That must have felt good,” he said to her.

“Nah. Not
so much really,” she replied.
 
“A bit of
a let-down, actually.”

She
headed to the clinic, but decided she would stop off at the commissary first
for a bite to eat before taking on the stream of patients she knew she’d find
waiting for her when she got back. Her phone hadn’t rung in the last two days
with any emergency calls, but she knew it would just be a matter of time before
it did. Spend ten minutes in the green and something would find you, try to
make a meal out of you, or use you for an incubator for its nasty progeny.

They’d
set up the clinic and the biology labs adjacent to one another so that she and
Rachel could exchange information better. The concept was simple. Rachel was
making daily excursions with the two volunteers she’d Shanghaied to help her.
Rachel's job was to continue to inventory the biological hazards and put out
releases through the communication system with any information gained about the
hazards and how to avoid them. Rachel’s sample collection work required a
certain amount of scientific rigor to classify the risks. Donna’s sample
collection system was far more efficient. The infected colonists themselves
were the collection vectors. All she had to do was go to work each day and let
the colonists’ bodies provide the perfect collection mechanisms for the
jungle’s virulent life forms. They had a nearly constant flow of new hazards
whose modus operandi they could view firsthand. And since so many of the
incidents were duplicates, there were often some additional details revealed
that helped round out their knowledge over time.

The
commissary was comprised of two long rows of open-air tables and benches all
covered with a suspended and stretched fabric roof to shield the sitters and
standers and talkers from the hot Verdian sun or sudden downpour. Against one
side was another long table stacked with the day’s fare and tended by a Bobby
Cooper, a cheerful and dutiful son of one of the Bondsmen.
 
Bobby’s job was to keep the food organized
and sanitary enough to eat during the day. The job wasn’t too hard when the sun
was up, but by the time the sun started down, it was time to seal the containers
and put the remains of the day’s offerings in the metal larders behind the
table.

 
The commissary was the informal gathering
place for the colonists where they’d breakfast before pursuing the day’s work
or break when the sun was high for lunch; or if not too late in the day, stop
off for dinner before going home. It was the community gathering place and the
site of daily, informal town meetings. Here, rumors were exchanged or squashed
flat, and the latest news always communicated in the fastest known way: mouth
to ear.

Donna
picked up a meat and vegetables platter from Bobby and headed over to sit with
John and the other shuttle pilot, Tom Yelton. Donna didn’t know Yelton very
well, and had never spoken to him, but she knew him as a friend of John’s. And
any friend of John’s was a friend of hers and came with an automatic
endorsement.

She sat
down with a glance of approval at Yelton and took a swig of coffee.

“Nice hot
day, huh?” she said to either of them.

“Nice hot
day,” they said almost in unison.

“Seems a
little cooler than yesterday,” John offered.

“Who can
tell?” Donna said.

“Who can
tell?” Yelton agreed and sucked his teeth with a pleasant expression. Donna
considered him with a candid look with her blazing eye.

“Who’s
your pal?” she said to John. “Introduce us.”

“Oh, yeah,”
John said hustling through it. “Damn. I’m sorry. This is Tom Yelton, Shuttle
Pilot Grade Four. He’s an old friend of mine. Tom, Donna Applegate, Nurse
Grade. .whatever. You’ll have one of her needles in your ass eventually, for
something.”