“I can’t see!” Miller shouted. He was prone as well, with his chain gun up, but it was firing sporadically, many of the rounds flying over the heads of the aliens.
“Toggle your top camera!” Weaver yelled. “Setting Three! Setting Three!” He aimed at a rhino-tank that was just heaving itself to its feet and was pleased to see the 25mm rounds splash goo out of its side. The tank shuddered, did a couple of side steps and then lay down again, its legs twitching. Fortunately it didn’t explode.
Other than that he wasn’t getting very many impressions. The lighting in the room was badly damaged, probably from the explosion, but it was strong enough that it was interfering with the automated low-light circuitry of the cameras. They kept switching from normal to low-light setting. There was also a smell, harshly chemical with a slight undertone like rotten fish. He knew he’d smelled it somewhere before but he couldn’t quite place it. On the other hand, he knew for sure that his quarantine integrity had been breached to hell and gone.
There were lots of thorn-throwers, lots of dogs and he was hammering out rounds, single shot, carefully aimed using the laser sight on the Bushmaster. Standard Bushmasters had neither laser sights nor a selectable switch but the armorer, who had a Ph.D. in engineering, was a foresighted man and had made some adjustments. Weaver noticed that the SEAL had started to get his fire under control and assumed he had switched cameras.
“What, exactly, are we doing here?” Miller asked as he took out another of the rhino-tanks. There were so many of the Titcher in the room the tanks couldn’t seem to decide whether to fire or not. Or, maybe, they didn’t want to damage the room. Good.
“Getting a look at what is on the other side before we nuke it,” Weaver replied.
“Good, we’ve done that,” the SEAL said. “Time to do the Mogadishu Mile.”
“What?”
“Run away, run away!”
“Oh, okay,” Weaver replied. He hooked his hand under him and pushed up to his knees then up to standing. Then he froze.
“What the fuck… ?” he heard Miller mutter.
The thing was probably just the right size to fit through the gate. It was, essentially, a mobile, green cone that looked like nothing so much as a mound of manure. Tentacles that might have been purple extended from its base and it was glowing, faintly. It also was waddling towards them serenely through the chaos of the gate room.
“I don’t know what the fuck that is,” Weaver said, taking a step back and lifting his Bushmaster as well as he could with the functional right arm. “But I think we should shoot it.”
“Damned straight,” the SEAL said, flicking his selector switch from semi to full auto and letting out a stream of depleted uranium penetrator rounds.
What the SEAL had failed to consider was that he had previously been firing from the prone, where the mass of the suit was in contact with the ground. Also, he had been firing single shots, each of which shoved the heavy suit back a few inches. If things hadn’t been so chaotic he might have considered the recoil of those shots. But he did not. So when he pulled the trigger, intending to send out a controlled burst of three rounds, the recoil staggered him backwards through the gate as his hand automatically clenched, a monkey reaction from falling, on the trigger.
The first round, however, hit the thing squarely on the front of the cone. The second was near the top, just to the left of a small, brightly glowing patch. Where the third was didn’t really matter because by that time the thing had exploded.
Weaver had also been knocked back by the recoil of his weapon but he was actually in the process of gate transference when the explosion, categorized from later inference as right at sixty megatons, occurred.
Collective 15379 was nonresponsive. How interesting.
“Collective 12465, report on physical conditions near Collective 15379,” Collective 47 emitted.
“Mushroom cloud and radiation emissions categorized as sixty megaton quarkium release,” 12465 reported. “Outer collective processes 12465, 3456, 19783 damaged. All functions 15379 terminated.”
15379 had reported attacks by fission/fusion weapons and had registered intent to respond with a quarkium unit. Collective 47 had automatically given assent. Once a bridgehead had been secured with sufficient standoff to prevent destabilization of the wormhole the quarkium unit would be detonated and then colonization could recommence with the local area seared of hostile forces.
Something had somehow predetonated the quarkium unit.
Collective 47 could not be said to feel anger or sadness at the demise of the subcollective called 15379. Collectives were, essentially, immortal and 15379 might have, in time, created as many subcollectives as Collective 47, thereby increasing the Race and ensuring its security. Not to mention that the subcollective was a major supplier of vanadium and a few other trace metals as well as a huge source of biological material via two slave races.
But the loss of Collective 15379 could be borne. It would decrease the status of Collective 47 to a degree and reduce its balance of essential trade. But those, too, could be borne. What was questionable was whether the Race could afford another species to damage it so severely. The Race had encountered many species in its expansion from gate to gate and some of them, the Alborge for example, were significant threats to the survival of the Race itself. If the Alborge ever exerted themselves they could erase the Collective in a span of time that had no meaning. But would be very, very short. The sophonts of world 47-15379-ZB might, in time, become such a race. That could not be borne.
“All subcollectives,” Collective 47 emitted. “Reestablish contact with gates to world 47-15379-ZB. Initiate twenty-five percent increase in all combat unit systems, ground, air, space and liquid, emphasis on systems level four through seven. Order all slave races to initiate assault plans; deception plan is terminated.”
Collective 47 was going to war.
Susan McBain was puzzled.
The portal in Mississippi that had so startled the survey team by its vacuum opened onto a planet. It wasn’t quite a vacuum, simply very thin atmosphere. About what you’d expect on Mars. The planet looked a bit like Mars, as well, except for the lambent purple sun that was setting in the east. It was dry and desolate, the ground scarred for miles and miles, somewhat like the outskirts of Newark.
None of that had Susan puzzled.
What was bothering her was the biology of the planet, such as it was.
She had received samples from the initial survey team and decided that they just couldn’t be right. The survey team was an environmental company that normally responded to hazardous waste spills. It had gone to the far side, collected samples of soil and air, and returned. Then a large metal plate had been put over the gate to prevent more loss of atmosphere.
Despite the fact that the survey team was supposed to avoid contaminating the samples, they had to have done so. Otherwise the biology of the far world made no sense.
Oh, it was alien, to be sure. She had tentatively identified a type of archeobacteria in the soil and it was unlike anything from earth. But what was bothering her was dichotomies. The soil was almost entirely depleted of any form of nutrient; there was no phosphate, nitrate or any trace material useable by plants in it. It was almost, but not quite, pure silica and iron with some traces of elemental carbon.
However, “almost” wasn’t “pure.” Besides the archeobacteria, there were traces of proteins all over it. More proteins than you’d get, say, in clean sand in the desert. And the proteins were not the same as those found in the archeobacteria. Not even vaguely the same. They used completely different amino acids for one thing. Amino acids different from Earth’s and different from the Mreee. In fact, the only place she’d seen amino acids like those were from Titcher remains. Which was why she suspected contamination. The same company had done some clean-up work with the Titcher and the only thing she could think was that they had contaminated the samples.