A Season For Slaughter Part 16

"The satellites are refusing to recognize our ID."

"That can't be."

"I can't even get a weather scan." She sounded frantic.

"Let me try." I dropped down into my chair and started typing. I recited a steady stream of commands into my headset.

Sorry. This ID is not valid.

s.h.i.t. That didn't make sense. I tried again-this time with my personal account number.

Sorry. This ID is not valid.

For a moment, I sat staring, unbelieving. The message on the screen in front of me was incomprehensible. It was a door slammed in my face.

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h," I breathed softly. "He cut us off."

"Who did?"

"The late Randy Dannenfelser."

"Huh? When did he die?"

"He starts tomorrow." I called forward, "Siegel?"

"Prowler's on standby. But I can't set up a satellite link."

"Not surprised. Okay. Plan B. Valada, how's our food and water situation?"

"We're good for two weeks."

"More than enough."

"Uh-oh. I don't like the sound of that."

"Willig? What's the wind velocity?"

"Forty klicks."

"s.h.i.t. We'll never outrun it. Okay. Anchor this thing. Make it airtight. You know the drill. Go!"

While they worked, I turned back to my keyboard. Hm. I wondered. It had worked once, a long time ago. What were the chances it would work again? Slowly, I typed in Captain Duke Anderson's ID number and pa.s.sword. I fully expected it to be rejected, but-The screen lit up in connect mode. "I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"Huh?" Willig glanced over my shoulder. "How'd you do that?"

"Magic," I answered. "Go away, you'll spoil the spell." I folded my arms across my chest and thought for a moment. I had to think about this. I couldn't request any information about this sector. Whatever else Dannenfelser was, he wasn't a fool. He would have installed watchdog programs to monitor all requests. If I'd been doing it, I'd have clamped a security lid on the whole sector.

And I had to be careful what I uploaded too. Any messages originating from this area would be suspect. I couldn't contact anybody in the military directly. Those communications would probably all be monitored and therefore would be directly accessible to Dannenfelser. He wasn't stupid. If I tried contacting anybody I knew, I'd probably be putting them directly on his little list.

There was one person... maybe two.

I.

punched for Lizard and coded the message Private/ Personal/Confidential/Eyes-Only, and then I scrambled and encrypted it. "I know you're p.i.s.sed at me," I said. "And I wouldn't blame you if you ignored this message.

But I don't have any other channel of communication. We've been totally locked out of the network. I repeat, we've been locked out of the network. We can't even call for pickup. And we've got a big pink cloud headed our way. Lizard, this isn't fair.

Maybe I've earned this kind of treatment, but my team shouldn't have to be the victims of this too. This is an emergency, very likely a life-threatening one." I stopped in midthought.

What did I want her to do? What did I expect her to do? I shook my head slowly in confusion. There wasn't really anything she could do for us. It was too late to arrange a pickup. A chopper couldn't get here before the pink cloud rolled over us.

Reestablishing the network links would restore the connection with the outside world, but seeing as how we'd already cut them off first, there wasn't a lot we could say to them that wouldn't sound foolish.

I spoke softly as I concluded, "I don't know what you can do to help us. Maybe nothing. But if we don't come back, at least you'll know how we were set up. Don't let them get away with this." I paused to consider my next words. Should I tell her again how much I loved her? I really didn't feel all that loving right now. I sighed.

"Over and out."

There was one other person who might accept a message from Captain Duke Anderson (deceased). But I didn't know how he would feel about my using his father's account. I'd inherited it through a particularly nasty chain of events, and even though I hadn't used the access number in a long time, the account had apparently never been disconnected.

I took a breath and sent the message. "General Anderson, this Captain James Edward McCarthy. I don't know if you remember me, but you pulled General Tirelli and me out of a cottan-candy storm a few years back. I'm sorry to have to contact you this way, but I seem to have gotten myself into the same situation again." I wondered how much I could tell him about my mission. What was General Anderson doing these days? What was he cleared to know? I had the sense that Lizard spoke to him occasionally, she'd mentioned his name a few times, but she'd never been very clear about his duties.

"The thing is, sir, that I have no other way of sending a message out. We've been cut off from the network. I believe it's on the direct orders of General Wainright or somebody on his staff. Our backup vehicle has been recalled, and we've been abandoned out here. This isn't right, sir. We've got a very delicate situation. We've got a major-I repeat, major-ecological discovery working. And people are playing politics with us. My team needs your help. I'm not asking for me. I'm asking for them. Please check with General Tirelli. She can background you. This is a life-threatening emergency. Help us, please. Over and out."

I logged off and disconnected. I hoped the messages had gotten onto the network without the location of their origin being tagged.

Willig had been waiting for me to finish transmitting. Now she said, "We'll be under the first edge of it in five minutes. The prowler is on low-energy standby, the spybirds are both back aboard, both are in decontamination, the vehicle is anch.o.r.ed and spiked, lookouts have been set, overhead scanners are active, we're on low-power mode, and confidence is so high, it's giddy." Then she added, in a darker tone, "You've been through this before, haven't you? What can we expect?"

"Boredom, mostly." The look on Willig's face suggested that she didn't believe me. I shrugged and added, "If we're lucky."

"Go ahead," Willig said. "Scare me."

I shook my head honestly. "I don't know. I expect we'll see a feeding frenzy that ripples up and down the whole food chain, but whatever else is going to happen here, I have no idea. I don't know how shamblers or shambler tenants react to cotton-candy storms, and I have even less idea about what might happen down where the prowler is."

"So what do we do?"

I considered it for half a moment. There wasn't much left that needed doing. Rule number one (this week): when in doubt, do nothing. Check your weapon. Eat. Sleep.

We'd already checked our weapons, and the sleep schedule was posted- "Let's have supper."

Most people believe that the process of colonization/invasion began with the plagues, but a little consideration of the matter will show that this represents a serious misreading of the events in the process.

Certainly, the plagues that swept across the globe were the most dramatic and devastating effect of the initial Chtorran presence on this planet, but in actuality, the first Chtorran species would have had to have been here on Earth, spreading and establishing themselves for at least five to ten years prior to the advent of the first of the plagues.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 17.

A Discovery The most effective spice in the world is hunger."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

Supper was some of that same yellow, b.u.t.tery, bread-like stuff that they fed to the herds that roamed the California coast-though without the tranquilizing additives. At this point, I almost would have preferred the tranks. But the government, in its infinite wisdom, acknowledged our humanity by granting us the luxuries of anxiety, fear, anger, and depression. I wondered about the people in the herds. Did they know? Did they care? Were they happy-0r just unconscious? Did it even matter?

Did any of us have a choice? In a Chtorran-dominated world, sooner or later we might all end up in a herd of some kind.

I wondered if I would remember what it was like to love and to care. Probably not. I probably wouldn't feel anything at all. The thought of what it might be like left me so depressed, I couldn't eat. I left the remainder of my meal forgotten in its plastic tray. The great southwestern herds were both a warning and a preview. They grew larger during the warm summer months, but during the winters, they shrank-partly because the sick and elderly died off, and partly because the discomfort of the colder weather actually triggered the partial rehabilitation of some individuals; but the wandering herds had pretty much become a permanent phenomenon.

We'd seen pictures of larger herds in India, but that had been a transitory phenomenon; the monsoon season had broken up the great Indian migration. There had also been rumors of a herd numbering more than a million individuals roaming through central China, but the reconst.i.tuted Chinese Republic refused to acknowledge any requests for information on the subject. Satellite scans had been inconclusive. How do you tell the difference between a crowd of mindless Chinese ambivalents and a crowd of Chinese prisoners of war? Both were herded by tanks.

And that made me think about freedom. That was another casualty of the war.

Even those of us who thought we were free were only living an illusion. You can have freedom only where you have choice. Eliminate choice and freedom disappears. And the human race didn't have any choices anymore; we had to fight this war. The only courses of action left to us were reactive ones, determined by the actions of the Chtorran. We were locked in a dance of death with the worms, and they were just as enslaved by the music as we were. Maybe even more so. But that wasn't a new thought. The Chtorrans were enslaved by their biology, just as we were enslaved by ours. If only we could know the nature of that enslavement. Ours, as well as theirs.

I remembered something that Foreman had said in the Mode Training.

"Everything is enslavement. You just pretend that it isn't." Now, again, I understood what he meant. We were enslaved by the circ.u.mstance. We were sitting in the van, waiting for the storm to pa.s.s. There wasn't anything else. We were free to do only what the universe would allow us to do.

The cotton candy would pile up around us, we couldn't even guess how deep it would get; and then we'd have to wait until the pink sugary dust was devoured by whatever hordes of frenzied Chtorran insects came hatching up out of the ground.

What didn't get eaten while it was still fluffy would collapse into a sticky sludge that would blanket the landscape for days, killing even more Terran life forms-plants, small animals, bugs, anything that couldn't clean itself. If the cotton candy came down thick enough, a week from now all this rumpled terrain would be a brown mola.s.ses desert. And a month or so after that, it would be a crimson Chtorran meadow. And a year after that, it would be a towering scarlet forest; a pastel wonderland of frolicking bunnydogs and giant red man-eating caterpillars, all singing songs of love and wonder and lunch.

I felt the despair like a ceiling crushing down on me. No matter how hard I pressed back, it was always there; it just kept coming back, each time pushing closer than before. I couldn't make it go away. If I kept busy, I could pretend I didn't feel it. If I kept busy, I could distract myself. If I kept busy, I wouldn't have to deal with that thing I didn't want to admit. But there wasn't anything to do, and the desperate pressure came rolling in again, like a big rosy, smothering wall.

I suppressed a shudder; it didn't work. I covered by pretending to stretch. I leaned back in my chair; it creaked alarmingly, but it held. I put my arms behind my head and stretched-but no, I couldn't quite get the vertebrae in my back to give one of those long, satisfying knuckle-crunching cracks. d.a.m.n. Everything today was almost, but not-quite.

Willig was watching me carefully. I glanced over at her. "You know what?" I said.

"What?" she asked.

"You remind me of a dog I had once."

"Oh?"

I nodded. "She'd lie on the floor at my feet, content to wait patiently for whatever I might decide to do-a cookie, a walk, a ball-but the giveaway was that she never took her eyes off me. She even slept with her ears open. I swear she even counted the sounds of pages turning. Whenever I finished whatever I was reading, she'd sit up and look at me. She never asked for anything outright, but she was always there.

Always. She was totally tuned to my every move." I gave Willig a speculative look.

"Does that sound like anybody we know?"

Willig was pouring out a fresh cup of brown stuff. She put it into the holder on my work station and looked at me with her big soft brown eyes. "Try throwing a ball and find out."

"Right. It'll have to be a masked ball, so no one will recognize you." I picked up the steaming cup and sipped at it cautiously. Ugh. n.o.body liked the stuff, but we all drank it anyway. The fact that it was probably poisonous was an added benefit.

The most effective way to kill every dangerous bug swimming in a volume of water was to make brown stuff out of it. You could leave an uncovered container of brown stuff standing in a field full of Chtorran parasites for a year and come back to find that nothing, absolutely nothing, had grown in it. What brown stuff did to your internal plumbing was every bit as wonderful. The technology of antisepsis had advanced light-years.

Brown stuff was also good as rust preventative, transmission fluid, shark repellent, and sheep dip. Aside from that, it was delicious. "Ahhh," I said, appreciatively. I made a great show of licking my chops and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Yum."

Willig raised an eyebrow at me. "Oh, really?"

"All right," I lied. "Next time, you could put in a little more battery acid, okay?"

"We're out of battery acid. I had to subst.i.tute buffalo sweat."

"Ah, good choice." I swung around back to my station. The remains of my dinner sat forgotten to one side. I put the mug down next to it and realized that at some point between yellow stuff and brown stuff, I'd made a decision. "Siegel," I called.

"Jawohl, mein Kapitkn?"

"Heat up the prowler again."

"Huh?"

"As long as we're sitting here, let's get some work done. Let's find out what happens in that hole when the pink starts. .h.i.tting the ground."

"You got it." A moment later. "We're alive again."

I pulled the helmet down over my head slowly, fitting myself back into the cybers.p.a.ce reality as gently as I could. It didn't work. I shuddered into position, and I was struggling queasily to maintain my footing at the bottom of a giant wet stomach. Everything was slippery here, everything had an oily look. It made me squeamish and uncomfortable.

But Siegel had done something to the audio-video spectra, and nothing was quite as intense as it had been before. I could still sense the rhythmic pumping, the pulsing, the incessant industrial throbbing of this living factory; but it was no longer quite so overwhelming.

"Let's start by taking samples," I said.

"We have another problem," said Siegel. "We need to get Sher Khan out of this sludge at the bottom. It's rising. Not fast, but fast enough to worry me."

"Right," I agreed. Then I understood the problem. "It's too slippery to climb."

"Can I use the claws?" Siegel asked.

"Guess we're going to have to. But do it gently. Let's try to avoid any serious damage, and let's hope that this thing doesn't have enough of a nervous system to feel real pain."

Siegel took the controls of the prowler. Almost abruptly, the skidding sensation underfoot disappeared, replaced by a catlike plucking that accompanied every step.

We began picking our way upward and out. I could feel the fleshy surface twitching beneath us. I wanted to pull my hands out of the responders and wipe them off.

Already I felt sticky, dirty, and covered with slime. I suppressed the feelings and forced myself to focus on the job. "There-" I said. "See that big red jellyfish structure?"

"Got it."

"Let's get closer. I want to see what all those little flecks inside it are. I want samples of that first."

"Working," said Siegel.