Invasion (Vegetable Wars Book 1) Page 6

  He kicked a partially melted support beam out of the way and walked to the back of the house. This had been where his I Love Me wall had been, the culmination of his long career as a Marine. All of it was gone, now, and it felt as if that career had only been a dream. His eye caught a rectangular object on the ground, and he bent over to pick it up. It was a plaque from his first battalion as a second lieutenant. The top of the plaque had burned away, but enough of the bottom had survived that he could read “Second Lieutenant Colby Edson, Fair Winds and Following Seas from the Magnificent Bastards.”

  Half of a burned plaque wasn’t much to show for 51 years of service. With a shrug, he dropped it to the ground with the rest of the junk.

  Interlude I: Spores, Before and After

  Like a dormant seed within its pod, the Gardener dreamed. It waited in its vessel high above the planet, lost in contemplation as it luxuriated in the steady stream of data carried up from the atmosphere below. No slightest glint or gleam of energies spilled from within the vessel. No signal slipped out from its shell. The Gardener itself had designed the meta-cellulose that enclosed its home in space so as to render the vessel undetectable by its own kind, leaving it free to work without interruption. With visionary intensity it had painstakingly shaped the code underlying every gene for both optimization and aesthetics. The vessel could sense, react, absorb, ignore, and otherwise respond to both minimal and extreme gravimetric forces, as well as a broad range of hostile radiation. Out of a sense of ambition, it had nurtured the specifications to endure encounters in proximity to a gas giant, though of course it would never venture to such a world. What need for a Gardener where no garden could grow? But this world, a planet it had only visited twice before, most recently some two hundred of its revolutions ago, this world offered its vessel neither threats nor challenges.

  Or so the Gardener had presumed.

  Passive mappings had flowed into the vessel as the planet completed several rotations below, revealing crude, right-angled distributions of vegetation, the sort of blocky plantings that a newly sprouted child might make, in stark contrast to the graceful fractal distributions the Gardener had seeded during its last visit. But children were not permitted to stray into the gardens of adults, let alone possess the experience to create a vessel to take them so far from home.

  Other problematic signs had demanded its attention as well. Patterns of erosion, oceanic oxygen levels, and historic indications of rain density—each individually improbable but nonetheless plausible particulars—combined to hint that one or more other beings had come and placed their imprint upon this world. Imbeciles, judging by the data. Or worse, a Gardener who had put forth its own sense of the artistic instead of creating in tune to the universe’s whispers. Such things occurred, albeit rarely. It had caught word of just this sort of radical movement when it last tasted the soil of home. There were few enough Gardeners, and fewer still who chose to share their work in space, that even a pod’s worth could produce unsavory excuses for gardens amidst the otherwise barren planets and moons of the galaxy. And yet, surely, even such radicals would not presume to intervene on a claimed world.

  No, another factor was in play here. Over the span of several more rotations, the Gardener had turned its attention to gathering preliminary chromatography data. It had even repeated the initial analysis, but the outcome remained unchanged. The perfect garden it had seeded during its last visit now exhibited the presence of complex toxins that could not exist in nature. They ruled out the possibility of even the most extreme and iconoclastic of Gardeners or even any of the weak imitators scattered among the lesser races of the galaxy. Only a single explanation existed: Meat.

  Every Gardener knew that a certain amount of meat was necessary to maintain proper atmospheric balance. Anaerobic gardens were certainly possible, some portions were actually elegant, but real complexity and biodiversity required a synergy of gases, and one could only go so far with plankton. It was the classic tradeoff, allowing larger and more complex invertebrates—and even vertebrates—into a garden could lead to a lush outcome, but time and again animal life proved itself a nuisance. The Gardener had observed similar patterns among its peers’ creations, some pesky vertebrate evolving over the course of millennia until it achieved a pathetic proto-sapience, and with it, invariably, a compulsion to either alter the perfection of the environment or simply overbreed until it poisoned its habitat with its own wastes.

  But this was different. Millennia had not passed, barely two hundred revolutions. Animal evolution did not advance at such rates, even in as idyllic an environment as it had put in motion before leaving. Moreover, the other signs of proto-sapient pests—alteration and degradation of the landscape in pursuit of mineral resources, erection of crude and short-lived structures, pollution of rivers as a consequence of early industry—none of these had occurred in significant density or frequency, or so the vessel’s passive scans suggested.

  Data would continue to pour in the longer it remained in orbit, but even at this stage it had detected only a single, major, artificial structure where none should exist. Enhanced optics might well reveal smaller constructions in the vicinity of the crude patches that marred its carefully designed plantings, and indeed, patterns and concentrations among the air vectors had implied these locations were the source for the toxins that had been introduced to its world.

  Was it possible? Had the Meat despoiling its garden arrived from outside? Could Meat ever achieve sufficient sophistication as to travel between worlds? Fantastic as the idea might be, the stuff of nightmares and madness, how else to account for the data?

  Deep within the husk of its navigational locker, the Gardener had stirred. Left to its own tendencies, vegetable nature preferred patience and slow change. Its own species evolution into motility had been weighed and discussed for ages before embracing the opportunities of choice and direction it afforded. Yes, they could now venture off world, travel into space and apply their vision to craft new gardens, but even so, all Gardeners sought stillness. In this next phase of gardening this planet, it had expected to spend fifty or more revolutions tweaking and pruning, and never having to physically move. Already the Meat had pushed it out from its comfort zone.

  In response to a pulsed signal, its husk had split and the Gardener had emerged. Green tendrils shot forth from its core forming ropey limbs, reinventing the motility it had shed upon entering the navigation locker. Even as carefully grown a thing as its vessel could not be allowed to handle all operations remotely; some few tasks required direction attention. It had slid and sloped its way to a subsection of the vessel, triggering long dormant processes.

  The Meat would have to be eradicated. Whatever flawed plantings it had devised would be razed to make way for the resumption of the original design. The crude shelters that Meat always seemed so fond of would be pulled apart, sundered down to constituent pieces, and these pieces further reduced to their basic elements with the help of a few revolutions of erosion until they were reclaimed by the soil. And the offending toxins would be absorbed by carefully designed vegetable tools programmed to encapsulate every molecule, removing it from interaction with the rest of the environment until the Gardener could deploy other tools to spirit the foulness away. If the Meat happened to be razed or sundered or otherwise destroyed in the process, that, too, would be just a part of weeding one’s garden.

  The Gardener had consulted its records of past work, made adjustments, and instructed its vessel to manufacture and disperse several loads of spores strategically so the prevailing air patterns would carry them to the Meat’s locations of disruption during the planet’s dark cycle. The basic resources needed by all organic life existed in abundance on this world, even in those places where Meat had gained hold. With the warmth of morning the spores had sprouted into purge agents, quickly achieved sufficient mass to acquire a rudimentary motility, and begun carrying out the directives the Gardener had encoded in them.

  By the end of the next day
cycle, its garden was back on track, leaving only a single, major structure with which to deal. An additional rotation’s worth of data indicated electromagnetic concentrations that did not belong in its garden, suggesting the possibility of an incursion of Mechanical pseudo-life. Irritating as that might prove, such an outcome made more sense than postulating the mysterious arrival of proto-sapient Meat. Moreover, the protocols for disabling mechanicals were well established. The Gardener keyed the creation and programming of a few billion additional spores, similar to purge agents but with combinatorial capabilities. Their insertion into the atmosphere would land them in a tight ring around the offending structure. As they quickened and took form, they’d encircle the target, establishing containment, and then advance, rending any inorganics in their path. Meat or Mechanical, all would be purged, the offending structure dismantled, and the insufferable electromagnetics eliminated.

  Afterwards, the Gardener would need to allocate time to study the data in order to learn the origin of such an affront, but best to resolve it first. And too, time was always on vegetation’s side, a concept Mechanicals could not appreciate and which Meat would never be able to grasp. Pleased with its efforts, the Gardener perambulated back to its navigation locker and drew the walls tight around itself, bonding once more with the living green of its vessel. Leaving the spores to do their work, it returned to the pleasures of contemplation.

  Part II: Reinforcements and Retreat

  “Come on, Erin, I really need to talk to the Dickhead,” Colby said.

  “You shouldn’t call the vice minister that, General. You know that. But I told you, he isn’t taking your call.”

  “Did you ask him face-to-face? And what did he say?”

  There was a pause, then, “I don’t want to repeat it.”

  “Tell me, Erin.”

  “It wasn’t nice, General.”

  “I’m a big boy. Tell me.”

  “Well, OK. He said he that you are a worthless piece of shit who should rot in hell.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. He knew that Vice Minister Asahi Salinas Greenstein hated him, but this went beyond the pale. This was a matter of security, not petty politics. Besides, the vice minister had won. He wasn’t the one exiled to a backwater agricultural planet at the edge of human space.

  When Colby had uncovered the corruption at the highest levels, the siphoning of war supplies to personal accounts, he’d thought the vice minister would have led the pack to throw the criminals into prison. He hadn’t realized the depth of the corruption or how high it went. When he’d been given the choice between resigning or being court-martialed over trumped up charges, he’d wanted to fight. It wasn’t until the threat of levying charges against his loyal subordinates that he’d given in and taken the poison pill.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t afford to get the vice minister’s personal secretary upset with him as well.

  “Erin, I’m going to record what I’ve observed here, all of it. If I’ve still got the connection, I’ll upload it to you. Please, please, get that to the Di. . . to the vice minister, or if not him, to General Tybor. This is important.”

  “I’ll forward it up, General. But with the resumption of hostilities with the Borealis Pact, some agricultural pest isn’t going to be high on anyone’s priorities.”

  Colby wanted to scream his frustration, but he damped that down.

  “Just do what you can, Erin, OK? I’ve got to go now.”

  He cut the connection, fuming. He was trying to report an invasion, because after examining what little was left of the marauding plants, he was convinced that they were not some lab experiment gone wrong but a full-scale alien attack.

  He’d been lucky just to make it through to his old boss. Communications, both on Vasquez and off-planet, had been cut. With the full capabilities of his implant, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but his implant had been stripped of those when he’d left the service. It had only been through some convoluted routing and hacking that his implant had been able to route the call through the local wormhole’s comms bot and back to New Mars, and then only to Erin’s public line. His implant estimated that he had fewer than 400 seconds before the bot’s AI caught up to his implant’s machinations, realized there had been a hack, and closed off the pipeline. Colby’s call had taken 405 seconds before he cut it off. Now, his best course of action was to record everything he’d seen, send it up as a pulse upload, then trust Erin to get it to the right person.

  He’d stood up to go back into the vault, and Duke jumped to her feet, tail wagging as she looked up at him.

  “Sorry, girl. I’ll try to find you something to eat, but I want to check the progress on the precipitate.”

  Colby hadn’t simply sat around all night in the vault. He’d known he’d been lucky with both his ANFO bombs and the methane. They’d been made on the fly, and the fact that they’d worked was nothing short of a miracle. He might have beaten back the assault, but that was only a battle, and the war might still be ongoing. If that was the case, he needed to be better prepared, so with his implant’s guidance, he’d been busy preparing better and stronger weapons. He’d already produced a better flammable jelly-substance that now filled two cylinders, complete with jury-rigged dispensers. They were bulky and heavy, but he thought they’d make passable flamethrowers. One task that took time, however, was to precipitate pure potassium chlorate from bleach. He’d been too lucky with the match heads setting off the detonator, so he needed to improve that.

  The process required to produce the potassium chlorate he needed released chlorine, so he wanted to precipitate the crystals outside, but he didn’t have a power source out there, and he’d had to do it inside the vault, but under the hood. This was actually the second step in the process, what his implant termed “fractional crystallization,” and he was more than pleased to see that the reaction looked to be completed. With the pure crystals, he could finish detonators for the almost-completed bombs he had prepared. An hour later, he had 30 powerful grenades lined up, ready to use. He carefully packed them into empty storage cases, then stacked them up by the door.

  He felt a sense of accomplishment, something he hadn’t experienced since he’d arrived on the planet.

  Let the bastards come again! I’m ready!

  Duke had been sitting alongside the wall, watching his every move. He felt guilty. The old girl had come to his defense, and he’d been ignoring her. His house was destroyed, but he should be able to scrounge up some food for her.

  “Come on, girl, let’s go see what we can find.”

  With her on his heels, he left the vault. As he crossed the compound, he opened the planetary comms net, more from routine over the last 15 hours than from any hope of hearing from anyone, so he was surprised when a voice said, “Mayday, Mayday, is anyone receiving this?”

  “I am,” he said automatically, then instantly regretted it.

  In time of war, communications had to be limited. Even with scrambling messages, the mere fact that there was a transmission might give the enemy AIs information that they could use.

  “Who is this?” the female voice asked.

  Colby hesitated, but as he realized that this was obviously a human and not an invading plant, he said, “Colby Edson. I’ve got a farm in Guernsey. Thirty-one F.”

  “Oh, thank god! Are you OK? Were you attacked?”

  “Affirmative,” he answered, snapping into military-speak. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Topeka Watanabe, assistant launch coordinator, and I need help.”

  Colby knew the name, of course. All of his crops, all of the crops in the continent, were slung into space from Blair de Staffney Station, and he’d seen her tagline on most of his receipts.

  “What kind of help?”

  “We’ve been attacked by the plant things. They killed Sestus, and Riordan’s been hurt.”

  Riordan was the station director, but Colby had never heard of Sestus.

  “We�
�ve been hit pretty hard out here in Guernsey, too. I don’t think my neighbors made it, either. It looks like the attacks have stopped, though.”

  It was true. Colby had gone on a quick recon of the area that morning after emerging from spending the night in the vault. There wasn’t any sign of the plants, at least not living ones. This wasn’t only in the burned area of his farm; it was everywhere. All of the vegetation within sight had been destroyed, as had all buildings and windmills, leaving only his vault intact—damaged, but intact. Outside of the scorched area he’d burned, there were rapidly decomposing bodies of the invaders, but nothing living.

  “They’ve stopped for now, but there’s a ship above us in orbit, and it isn’t one of ours.”

  For a split second, Colby felt relief. A ship could take them off the planet. A ship would have comms back to New Mars or even Earth. But he also knew that no ship was scheduled for another two months, and Ms. Watanabe wouldn’t be telling him she needed help if it was a human ship. Still, he had to ask.

  “Is it alien?”

  “You’d better fucking believe it. It matches nothing on the scans.”

  “So, you’ve got power?” he asked.

  “I’m on back-up. Most of the station was destroyed. I’ve got the processing station and the cannon, and a few of the buildings are left. They did a number on us.”

  “I was a Marine Corps general—”

  “I know who you are. And I need you here. It’s your duty.”

  “Well, just hold on a minute. You’re 30 klicks away, and I don’t know if the way between us is clear of the enemy.”

  “It’s clear.”

  “How can you be sure, Ms. Watanbe?”

  “Because I saw them stop in the middle of their attack, then go off to die. Why don’t you know that, I mean if you’re alive, you must have seen it, too. They’re dead there, right?”