The combat suit generated a mild electromagnetic field that kept the bugs away, but pretty soon Jensen didn’t have to worry about it. When he reached the edge of the jungle, he noticed the insects seemed to stay behind an invisible line about three feet back from the last plants.
As seed planet catastrophes go, this one didn’t seem too bad. Looked like they just got the mixture of early insects wrong. Sometimes the smart boys back home guessed wrong. The genetic alterations made to plants that grew under this bluish light could very well have made them tasty to an insect that would otherwise ignore them. But what the hell did a grunt know about those things? He was just here to take samples and report back. The clean, straight line of demarcation had Jensen feeling antsy, though. What insect ate everything in a perfect line like that? Space locusts?
The rich soil where the jungle stopped appeared churned up, as if a well-disciplined platoon of wild hogs had come through here. But Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha had no life bigger than a dragonfly before Jensen and Roy arrived. The introduction of larger species had to be carefully controlled over decades to ensure a stable food chain.
Jensen selected a silver tube off his belt and knelt to scoop up a soil sample. He’d let Moira do all the brainwork.
Ping-ping!
The motion alert on his suit made Jensen snap to his feet. A vibration on his upper left chest pointed him toward whatever set off the sensor. Not Roy. Judging from the sound of crashing underbrush and snapping branches, the dog was exploring the jungle about fifty feet to his right.
Gun up, moving heel-to-toe, stable shooting platform.
He scanned for movement over the sights. Insects flitted behind him, but his motion alert was set to Combat Spec. It would only register something larger than two feet in length.
And as far as Jensen knew, the only two things in this star system that met that criterion were Roy and him.
He whispered into his throat mic. “Roy, here.”
Within moments, Roy stood at his side, ears up and forward, eyes locked ahead.
“Attack us?” Roy’s neck speaker said.
“No,” Jensen said.
“Attack them?”
That had actually been Jensen’s first instinct. In his world, when you knew where all the good guys were, you shot at anything else that moved. Especially when you’re light years from home and backup.
However, he worked for the Science Wing right now—Better than being mothballed after the war—and none of those pinheads had ever seen combat. They just wouldn’t understand if he killed some life form out here. Ours or otherwise.
“No. Only look. Go now,” Jensen said.
Roy obeyed without hesitation. He slunk off into the brush to the left. Jensen stayed in the green, away from the line of dark soil and rocks three feet to his right. Unsure of exactly which side he should watch, he just stayed put and waited—
Roy’s frantic barks set Jensen in motion like a starter’s pistol. He hustled through the brush, snapping twigs and crushing plants and flowers. He skidded to a stop next to his dog, finger a millimeter from the trigger.
The hollow boom of Roy’s barking had brought all the flitting insects to a halt. The dog stood in the green, but had his eyes locked on the dark soil. Out there. In the dead zone.
“Off!” Jensen yelled.
Roy stopped barking. He circled Jensen, excited and whining. “Move. Something move,” Roy said. “Out there.”
Ping-ping!
The suit alarm and Roy’s renewed barking made Jensen flinch so hard he almost shot off his own foot. Did he really see that? A mound of dirt out there. Had it been there before? He hadn’t really paid attention. It looked freshly churned up, but so did all the soil close to the line.
“Off!”
Roy stopped barking again. He came to the heel position without being told.
“Something move. Talk.”
“Talk? Talk to you?” Jensen said. That gave him the creepies.
“Yes. Bad feel,” Roy rumbled.
The dog trembled against Jensen’s leg. Whatever pinged his motion sensor and churned up that dirt had Roy worried. Jensen had seen the dog leap into a gun pit full of Rhotellian Marines with heavy weapons and kill three men with his teeth. Nothing scared that dog.
Except whatever the fuck this was.
“Okay, we’re heading back. We have samples for Moira to analyze, anyway,” Jensen said.
The two soldiers backed away together.
“This soil contains an abundance of a substance very much like mica, with atoms arranged in hexagonal sheets. But... it is not mica.”
Moira’s clipped voice rang off the stainless walls of the ship’s tiny galley.
“Well, what is it, then?” Jensen said.
“I don’t know,” Moira said.
Blowing on the cup of rancid black coffee did nothing to make it anything less than molten. Jensen dumped reconstituted cream into the tarry black liquid and took a sip.
“Blech. Whaddya mean? You know everything.”
“Hardly. I know only what my human programmers have told me,” Moira said. For a computer, she put on the human style snark pretty well.
“Yeah? That makes two of us. So what’s the big deal? An alien rock is bound to have alien minerals, right?” Jensen said.
He tossed Roy a piece of soy jerky. The dog gave it a half-hearted sniff, but didn’t eat it. Since they got back, he’d done nothing but lay there with his head on Jensen’s foot.
For a computer, Moira had a wide range of ways to express her exasperation with Jensen. She actually sighed.
“Early samples of soil from Seed Planet Four-Seven-Alpha indicate only trace amounts of this unknown substance, along with low readings of fossilized plant material. That’s the main reason we chose Four-Seven-Alpha. If plants grew here before, it stands to reason—”
“Which is all very fascinating. I just want to know what gave me and my dog the creeps out there,” Jensen said.
“I have no way of knowing what would cause an irrational psychological response in a human, much less a dog. What I do know for sure is that the soil is now riddled with this material that was once scarce. That, Jensen, would be called an anomaly in any basic high school science course.”
The food printer beeped and Jensen eased Roy’s head off his foot. He stroked the dog’s neck. “Shake it off, big boy. We got ’za on the way!”
He went to the printer and retrieved a pepperoni pizza. A disk of repurposed proteins dripping with orange oil. The first old Italian chef who came up with pizza would have killed himself if he saw this in the future. When Jensen sat down again, Roy put his head right back on his foot.
“Jensen?” Moira sounded a little put out.
Even Roy looked up when Jensen just kept eating.
“Good food?” Roy growled/said.
Jensen tossed a piece on the floor and Roy snapped it up.
“Are you going to act like a juvenile, or are you going to discuss this with me?” Moira said.
Fake pepperoni grease ran down Jensen’s chin. No expense spared for the troops. “Were we discussing? I thought you were just insulting me.”