“Shit! What are those things?”
“We call them shadow swarmers. His e-suit should protect him, God willing, if they’ve not been swarming him for too long. …”
Lieutenant Charles Ostend gave his passenger a sidelong glance, then shook his head. God willing? Muhammad Baqr was okay as collies went, but he shared the religious passion of all of the other Mufrids. The God-shouting fundy colonists on this miserable rock were utterly beyond his comprehension with their conviction that everything, including their very survival, depended solely upon God’s will.
Hell, why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in such a place in the first place was a question Ostend and his buddies in the 4th SAR/Recon Group had discussed endlessly in after-hours bull sessions ever since the Marines had landed and set up the perimeter. That had been … what? Five weeks ago? He checked his internal calendar. Yeah. Thirty-seven days. Earth days, not the crazy-short daylight cycles they had here.
Shadow swarmers? He’d not heard the term before, but it made as much sense as anything else on Ate a Boot. They’d homed in on a military distress transmission—a rescue beacon in a downed flier’s e-suit. They’d found him … but the guy was almost smothered by a mass of dark gray, leaf-shaped things. Ostend had the impression of millions of cockroaches, each bigger than a man’s outstretched hand and fingers.
He shuddered as he brought the SAR hopper’s nose high and gentled toward bare rock. He hated roaches, had an almost phobic fear of the things, and he didn’t want to think about what was going through that downed pilot’s mind right now.
The guy was alive, at least. Ostend could see arms and legs weakly thrashing about as he tried to pull, scrape, or kick the verminous creatures off of him.
“Okay,” Ostend said, uncertain. “How do we get to him?”
“We pull him inside,” Baqr told him. “The local life forms cannot tolerate high concentrations of oxygen.”
“Hey, Doc!” he called over the craft’s intercom. “We’ve got him in sight! But there’s a bit of a complication!”
“Doc” was a Navy corpsman, HMC Anthony McMillan, riding on the hopper’s cargo deck aft.
“What complication, Lieutenant?” McMillan replied.
“He’s covered with local crawlies. We need to pull him out of there. Mohammed says the oxygen in our air mix’ll kill them.”
“We’ll get him,” McMillan said. “Just get us there.”
The hopper’s two angled ventral wings folded up and rotated back out of the way as landing skids extended, and the craft gentled down ten meters from the writhing mass of swarmers. The port-side cargo-bay door irised open, and two men in Marine utility e-suits and armor jumped out, jogging toward the downed man, the spiders strapped to their backs flexing and working against the planet’s gravity. As they moved through the spotlight beams ahead of the hopper, exaggerated shadows shifted and flickered through dust-illumined shafts of light.
Ostend and Baqr watched from the hopper’s cockpit, keeping the external lights centered on the writhing figure atop the low rock outcrop. One of the corpsmen began pulling swarmers off the man’s suit, peeling them off by the fistful and flinging them away into the darkness. The other was plugging something into the pilot’s helmet.
“What are those swarmer things doing to him, anyway?” Ostend asked.
“Trying to eat him, of course,” Baqr said with a shrug. “Or, rather, trying to eat his e-suit. They must have become sensitized to the carbon in his e-suit.”
“They eat carbon?”
Baqr gave him a mild look. “So do you and I. The life on Eta Boötis is carbon-based, as is the life on Earth. And carbon-based life requires sources of carbon for growth and metabolism. Most of the mobile life forms here get the carbon from carbonaceous mineral deposits—they are lithovores. The sessile forms get it from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—lithoautotrophs.”
“So, just like plants and animals on Earth.”
“Only by very rough analogy. The mobile forms, the swarmers, are more like Earth’s plants, actually, getting what they need from the soil. Very active plants. They can be so here, with the abundance of energy available on this world.”
Mohammed Baqr, Ostend knew, was a xenobiologist, one of the senior scientists in the Mufrid colony on Haris, so he must know what he was talking about. It sounded crazy, though—plants moving and swarming like hungry piranhas.
“Can they get through his suit?”
“Eventually. Swarmers possess grinding plates within their ventral orifices, very hard, like organic diamond. The carbon nanoweave fiber of our e-suits is extremely tough, but eventually the grinding will wear through, yes. We’ve lost several of our people to the swarms.”
The two corpsmen were unfolding a collapsible stretcher and were strapping the pilot onto it. Swarmers continued to flit through the shadows, circling, moving closer.
“Those things can’t be plants.”
“The analogy is inexact,” Baqr told him. “Remember, this is an alien world, with an alien biosphere. We use words like “plant” and “animal” because these are the only words we have, and they come with meanings shaped by our experiences on Earth. The reality is … different. Much different.”
“Yeah, but look at them! Those things are tracking our people!”
“Technically, the individual swarmers all are part of a single organism. It … disperses itself across hundreds of square kilometers in order to locate widely scattered deposits of accessible minerals. When one … leaf finds a source of easily ingested carbon, we believe it communicates with the others through low-frequency sound waves transmitted through this dense atmosphere. And they begin to swarm. More and more of them, drawn from farther and farther away.”
“So we’re dealing with walking, meat-eating trees,” Ostend said.
“Ah … no. The swarmers are not plants, really.”
“Then they’re animals that act like plants … except they eat meat and move?”
“They are neither plants nor animals,” Baqr said, a touch of exasperation edging his voice, “not in the sense you mean.”
Ostend was about to reply to that, but he saw that the two corpsmen were approaching the hopper, carrying the stretcher between them. So far as he was concerned, the Marines would be getting off of this rock soon and he wouldn’t have to worry about swarmers, whatever the hell they truly were, ever again.
“How’s the patient?” he called over the comm net.
“Alive, Lieutenant,” was McMillan’s response. “But that’s about all. Cargo deck hatch is closed and sealed.”
“Here’s some fresh air, then,” Ostend said, passing his hand through a virtual control. “Don’t try breathing it yet, though.” Pure nitrogen began flowing into the pressure-tight cargo deck, forcing out the native atmosphere—nitrogen because the higher oxygen content of a terrestrial atmosphere might react unpleasantly with the methane and other compounds in the Haris gas mix. He brought the cargo deck pressure up to two and a half atmospheres, then began bleeding off the overpressure and adjusting the gas mix to Earth standard.
By that time, the hopper had lifted from that desolate, scorched-rock plain and was streaking north, back toward the Marine perimeter.
To Ostend’s way of thinking, in fact, they couldn’t leave Haris soon enough. The collie they’d assigned as his friendly native guide could have the place and its weird biology.