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."