Bellus paused.
I knew what he was thinking. Three days ago he'd abruptly taken control of this mission with the reassuring words, "I'm only here as an observer, you understand?" I understood. He was taking control. My job was to make him look good. Now he was considering whether or not to slap me down for being insubordinate or compliment me on doing my job.
"Very well. Carry on," he said sourly.
Right.
Prior to our coming through with rollagons and tanks, we had sent thirty-six spiders and over a hundred skyballs through this area. Neither worms nor humans had been seen here as recently as three days ago. There were some broken roads to be found, and the occasional abandoned ruin, but there was no evidence of any postdefoliation survival.
The military spiders were now programmed to burn worms automatically, as well as any humans in officially designated renegade-controlled areas, but they weren't yet programmed to target shamblers. The software couldn't make all the necessary discriminations yet, and Oakland was still playing it safe.
Unfortunately, the shamblers were turning out to be almost as dangerous as worms and renegades. They were tall and ficuslike, with interwoven columnar trunks; where the trunks split, the limbs stretched upward into tangles of thick ropy branches and dark snakey looking vines; but the shamblers were always blanketed with symbiotic partners, so no two individuals ever looked the same. Some were tall and dark, burnished with large shiny leaves and gauzy lacelike nets; others were slender and bony, but fluffed out with cottony pink tufts of nascent flowering; and still others were horticultural ragamuffins, a patchwork of colors, dripping down off the towering growth like a shower of banners and veils.
By themselves, the shamblers would have been obvious. But the landscape they wandered through was no longer completely Terran; it was dotted here and there with clusters of tenacious infestation; red kudzu and mottled creeper vines, cold blue iceplant and cloying purple fungi, black vampire ivy and wandering wormberry, all of them spreading as rapidly as a nasty rumor. The way the Chtorran infestation rolled over everything-trees, buildings, signs, boulders, abandoned cars-everything looked the same, differing only in the height and breadth of the lump it made in the landscape. So how could you tell if any specific lump was a shambler-especially when a shambler could look like anything?
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.