Dominant Species Volume Three -- Acquired Traits (42 page)

She
smiled at them and tried to push aside the sobering thought that before her
eyes were perhaps the single last remaining cluster of the species Homo sapiens.
And try as she might to suppress it, the thought persisted.

She
cleared her throat again and got ready to tell them all about the little wasps
that had killed eight hundred of their numbers more swiftly than an army. She
would tell them that in so doing, the little wasps had decimated their
remaining human gene pool, reduced it to a marginally sustainable number of
breeding contributors, in a matter of just a few minutes. She would take them
back a thousand years and tell them about the Verdian witches and how they had
come to Earth to condition the wasps for a very special and heinous task. She
would tell them about some very special people a thousand years ago—Phil Lynch,
Bailey Hall, Mary Pope, Tom Moon—and Gilbert Keefer.
 

She would
tell them everything.

We’ve
probably lost, she thought. We’ve had our chance. We won’t be able to survive
here. Nature, in the end, will not favor Homo sapiens.

* * *

       
When the wasps had done their job and
laid their eggs in the human hosts and when the last of them had buzzed away
into the green, all but four hundred and eleven of the colonists on Verde’s
Revenge were left standing. The others lay paralyzed where they fell, their
bodies slack and pliable; rag-doll imitations of humans slumped and splayed on
the ground, in tubes, in shelters or in containers that weren’t completely
closed when the buzzing pestilence came.

Within
hours of the attack, those who had been stung regained some control of their
limbs, rose to their feet and ambled dumbly here and there, shaking off the
effects of the sting-induced coma the wasps had put them in.

And hours
after that, they started to scream.

They
screamed and trembled in place or ran aimlessly in a futile attempt to get away
from the hundreds of tiny mincing jaws eating them alive from the inside out.

Unable to
understand, let alone help the ones infected, the ones spared were helpless
observers of the suffering of their family members and friends.
 
By nightfall on the day of the attack, all
eight hundred stung were dead, their bodies roiling with the twisting, chewing
wasp larva, as they fed and grew. Loved ones watched, tortured by helplessness,
and offered desperate and frantic comfort as the victims died.

Paul
Kominski and a handful of other mercenaries had been quick to mobilize
themselves into the semblance of an organizing force. Assembled by Rachel, with
hasty instructions about how to deal with the infection, Paul’s team directed
the clean-up work that buried all eight hundred dead and infected victims six
meters down in a long trench hurriedly machine-etched out of a patch of jungle
a few hundred meters off the side of the road.
 
Buried deep enough that the emerging larva would never survive the climb
up out of the pit on hatching, the plague was quickly contained.

Some
looked on in numb denial. Those prone to prayer, did so and wept.

Following
the attack, Paul and his enforcers then organized an interim governing council
comprised of a handful of representatives chosen at random from the ranks of
the survivors. Those who complained that their presence on the council would be
far more beneficial than those just chosen were warned off with a look and the
wave of a rifle muzzle. It was not an elected body, but it had the advantage of
quickly providing an approximation of a governing body. It would stand, Paul
had said, until a proper election could be conducted and a real council
installed with a proper mandate.

One of
the first actions of the council was to establish a police force. The
mercenaries, guns always at the ready, were the logical choices for the duty.
Deployed throughout the compound, the patrol had soon established itself as the
de facto power in the colony, responsible to the new council only, with Paul
Kominski as the interim authority over all. In the span of a single day, new
control, though not yet operating under an official charter and the rule of
law, was nonetheless established in the truncated colony.
 
Peace was once more at hand, and newfound
harmony was each colonist’s rifle-enforced right.

It was
good enough for the time being.

The
attack had left the colony enough goods, supplies and equipment for decades of
sustenance for a thousand or more people—but now available for consumption by a
mere fraction of that number. The relative wealth of this material, all new and
neatly packaged, stored in watertight containers and stacked relatively neatly,
was the lifeline for the remnants of the colony.
 
With food and medicine, communications gear,
heavy transport trucks, lifts, weapons, and self-contained shelters, all in
excess, most of the survivors believed they had more than an even chance of
relatively good health on the jungle planet for years to come. They could build
roads, plant crops if need be, fix cuts and bruises and bites and, even worse, if
it came to it. They had two medical doctors; a nurse; a dentist; a certified
biologist with biohazard training; riggers; engineers; two shuttle pilots;
mechanics and systems technicians.
 
There
was a wealth of tools for cutting, digging, building and fixing, as well as
diagnostic equipment and a dozen new shuttles. And with the new Handford
generators stacked in crates yet unopened, power enough to run it all for
hundreds of years to come.

But the
wasps had reminded them that they were likely the most vulnerable of species on
the planet—in spite of the wealth of goods they had dragged there with them. In
the days following the attack, still numbed and shaken with grief, most would
flinch cold at the imagined sound of a buzzing wasp. With vigilance raised to
hyper-levels, they watched the leaves and air for any shape or sound that might
reveal the virulent signature of another killing swarm of thumb-sized predatory
wasps.

* * *

 
“The wasps are a weapon,” Rachel began. “They
are a biological weapon in the control of a secretive, advanced race of alien
beings living somewhere on this planet.”
 
The comment started worried murmuring throughout the assembly.

“You’d
better clarify that,” a tall, scrawny man said loudly from within the crowd.

“I will
clarify it for you,” Rachel said loudly over the murmurs. “The wasps have been
conditioned specifically to prey on humans only. They can’t …

“Hang
on!” someone else yelled out. “Go back to the advanced race part. What about
them?”

“The
ones,” Rachel said, searching the area of the crowd she thought the voice had
come from, “The ones we thought were dead, the beings we found in the monolith
aren’t extinct —at least some of them are still alive—perhaps large numbers of
them.”
 

 
“You’re talking about those creatures we’ve
heard about that lived in the monolith?” another overwrought woman asked.

“Yes,”
Rachel said. “We’re not sure they lived in the monolith. But, yes. Those.”

“So are
the wasps going to come back?” a woman up front said in an accusatory voice.
The murmurs got louder.

Paul
rapped on the table with his pistol. “Let Rachel talk!” he barked.

The
murmuring died, and Rachel continued.

“These
beings, these Verdians, dropped millions of immature versions of the wasps on
the compound. They were in something like a cocoon, in a pupated state, when
they were dropped. They hatched out a few hours later, swarmed and then started
to hunt for prey. We were sitting ducks for them. We never had a chance. The
reason we didn’t is because the wasps had our scent—so to speak.

“In or
around the year 2006 these beings came to Earth and took hundreds of people
captive. They used the captives as hosts for the wasps and harvested the wasp
larva from the bodies of the captives after the wasps laid their eggs in them.”

“How do
you know all this,” a wiry Bondsman named Jackson asked.

Paul shot
the man a look.

“I know,”
Rachel said, “because I have this.”
 
She
reached into the satchel slung around her shoulder and pulled out Bailey Hall’s
blue notebook. “This notebook has a record of the entire event. It’s a diary
kept by one of the captives. Her name was Bailey Hall. She and a few others
planned to escape from the Verdian vessel on which this process I just
described was taking place. We don’t know if they escaped or not.

“Each of
the eight hundred who died two days ago are almost certainly distant relatives
of the captives taken by the Verdians over a thousand years ago on Earth. When
the Verdians released the wasps, these biological weapons went after the human
hosts who possessed the same genetic markers as the hosts they were harvested
from a thousand years ago.”

“That’s
preposterous,” Jackson scoffed. “It makes no sense at all.”

“Oh, it
does,” Rachel said. “Look. You’ve heard of the extinct fish called a salmon,
haven’t you,” she said to him.

“Sure. I
know what salmon were,” Jackson said.

“Well,
salmon as you know, in order to breed, only returned to the stream or river in
which they were born. And even though scientists were never able to identify
any single factor in the water that could direct them to that stream, somehow,
some hidden chemical or scent in the water directed the salmon to the right
stream. I think that’s what happens with the wasps. Some scent, something
extremely specific to a family chain, something inherited genetically, acted
like a beacon for the wasps.”

In the
back, a young man, still dressed in funeral black, said loudly, “So, they
somehow knew which ones of the ones they killed had this scent, and it was the
same as the scent of someone that person was related to a thousand years ago
and that the wasp larva hatched out of. Right?”

“That’s
basically it,” Rachel said. “I think the Verdians have been using this wasp
species for tens of thousands of years, maybe longer. I think they use them as
a way to control certain species on Verde that might get out of control for
some reason. I think the wasps are a highly specialized form of pest control.
They might even be used to control just a single strain, a single lineage
within a species.

“When the
Verdians discovered us here on their planet,” she went on, “I believe they
already had a storehouse of specialized wasps on hand trained just for our
scent. They must have preserved them or had them in some kind suspended
animation. I’m not sure. That’s my theory anyway.
 
All they had to do was dump them near us and
let the wasps do the rest. I think that the wasps can be conditioned to be
specialized, but that they can only breed in the host gene pool they were born
in. Nowhere else. They can’t just spontaneously jump from species to species or
even within species between varieties. They can’t even jump from one lineage to
another. If they can’t find more prey of the same lineage as the host they
hatch out of, they probably die without breeding again. So each specialized
batch of wasps self-extinct in short order. They are perfect for this kind of
work. The Verdians, I think, have cultured this species for this particular job
for maybe eons. I even doubt whether or not the wasps can live without the
specialized conditioning process of the Verdians. They may not be able to live
as a viable species without intervention. But that’s just a theory.”

“So the
Verdians think we’re pests?” a woman asked, unable to conceive of her place on
the planet as anything other than superior.

“Wouldn’t
you?” Rachel replied.

“I don’t
get it,” Jackson said. “How come we’re still alive then?”

“We’re
still alive,” Rachel replied, “because there were no wasps in the batch the
Verdians dumped on us that had hatched out of any of our distant relatives. I’m
not sure why that’s so. Those are answers I don’t have yet. But I suspect the
answer may be as simple as that.
 
None of
our own distant relatives were captured or made part of the harvesting process
during the visit to Earth. That’s the only thing that comes to mind right now.”

“So the
attack on Earth was incomplete?” Donna asked. “They didn’t get enough of the
larva harvested?”

“That’s
my theory,” Rachel replied. “Bailey Hall makes some notes in her diary that suggests
that the Verdians came to Earth to eradicate us as a species. In order to
succeed, they would have had to collect members of lineages to a certain
inherited depth from all over the planet. I think they failed. Bailey Hall and
her group may have had something to do with that. I don’t know. Her diary
suggests they did.”