Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (12 page)

She was in business before she’d even unpacked. They came running.
The extractions went smoothly. By the end of the day she had an alcohol-filled
jar of about twelve of the little bastards drifting in it and several
appointments the next day to remove at least four more. She hadn’t done
complete physical examinations and serum workups on the patients who came in,
and she saw a couple of cases of yeast-like epidermal infections and one Rigger
had a wet cough that sounded ugly. Another had a discharge from his nose the
color of grass. She’d scheduled follow-ups to see those individuals the next
day; this wasn’t the kind of place you got a simple case of athlete’s foot.

I knew it,
she thought
. This place is disease heaven .
. .”

She held the jar up in the light from the magnifier and studied
the grubs. They were rolled up into nearly spherical shapes, like bizarre
fetuses. She could make out the immature head parts and the sharp, tiny forelegs
that tucked flat against the thorax. They all looked to be in the same stage of
development. That fact and the information she’d gotten from the patients about
when the “stings” were acquired suggested to her that the insects might have a
long and seasonal life cycle. Everyone who had been parasitized had gotten
impregnated within a few days of each other, and as far as she knew, no one had
been “stung” in days. With any luck, she might not see any more of that particular
infection until the next season, whenever that was.

She’d been at it for six hours without a break. She made herself a
cup of coffee and sat down at one of the benches along the wall.

This is just the beginning.

There was no telling what horrors crept, crawled or buzzed through
the foliage, soil or air of this sodden planet. She thought about how much
valuable baseline data could have been in those inventories. Done properly,
they would have offered a wealth of information and would have been the
cornerstone of all the health and safety policies and procedures issued from
the clinic. As she mulled it over, her anger at Ed Smith grew. If she hadn’t
gotten there when she did, those things might have hatched out in a day or two,
or worse, might have migrated within the bodies of those people, sickening them
or, perhaps even killing them. Proper biological inventories might have
prevented it completely.

Every experienced contractor who signed on for off-world duty knew
the first part of a project’s schedule: the site was surveyed so that the
biological dangers could be cataloged, gassed, whacked, powdered and poisoned.
It was one of the most tedious, important and time-consuming phases of the
project. The inventories were mandatory. It was illegal not to do them.

She felt like shutting the entire project down right then and
there.

Stupid bastard. He’s endangering lives.

It wasn’t bad enough that children were made to do the work of
adults, but to put them in harm’s way through negligence was unthinkable. She
remembered how frightened Mike Kominski had looked when she told him she was
going to cut . . .

Christ.

She looked at the phone and pursed her lips. Aft whatshisname
hadn’t called back yet. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t. She’d have to force
the issue, and she was prepared to do just that, dammit. She’d give him a full
day just to be sure. After that, she was putting the pressure on.

8

After
dropping off the last contractor, John Soledad lifted off and put the shuttle in
a straight course down the jungle’s western-most edge, just above treetop
level, just like always.

He set his jaw, and for a moment feigned resistance to the call.

He wasn’t supposed to do it, but it wasn’t like he was breaking
any law or anything. Besides, he could get back in a matter of minutes if he
had to. It was just so damned boring sitting around with nothing to do for most
of the day.

Nobody would mind anyway.

He banked in a hard right turn, leaving the relative safety of the
clearing behind. In a matter of seconds he was half a kilometer into the
green.

He set the ship’s guidance to pick up the route he’d followed
yesterday. He’d try to go a little farther this time, maybe far enough to get a
look at that valley over the range of hills to the northwest.

How could they expect a pilot to sit all day anyway?

He lit a smoke. He wasn’t supposed to do that either.

Everybody he came in contact with complained about this project.
He heard the contractors bitching and moaning about it when they got on board
in the morning and when they left in the evening. They bitched about the heat,
they bitched about the rain, they bitched about the bugs, they bitched and they
bitched.

He didn’t mind any of that. In fact, he liked it. He liked the richness
and diversity of the plant life, especially the scent of the flowers once you
got away from the installation with its huge mounds of rotting plant stuff.
He’d set down in a dozen places over the last week, and each one seemed more
beautiful than the last. Just yesterday, he’d found an incredible sparkling
stream running through a deep green grotto. He didn’t think he’d ever seen a
more beautiful place. The stream plummeted over a fall of perhaps ten meters
into a crystalline pool. He’d been tempted to strip and jump into it; but since
he didn’t know what was in the pool, he decided against it. He’d taken pictures
for most of the morning; and when he left, he marked it on his map so he could
find it again. He planned to go back many times.

He watched the sea of green roll pass under the shuttle like waves
and delighted in the excitement and promise of discovery. This was what
piloting was all about, going into the unknown; seeing and experiencing new
things. He wasn’t just an airbus driver—he was a
pilot
for God's sake. One of these days he was going to snag the shuttle on his day
off and fly it all the way to the sea and back. Now that would be a trip.

He rounded “Soledad Spires” and headed down “Soledad Canyon” for
about ten kilometers. He could see the range of hills now dead ahead. He had to
guess at his ETA since the shuttle had no distancing radar. Fifteen minutes,
tops.

This section was one of the most scenic he’d seen and much of the
forest was broken by sharp rock outcroppings the color of rust and soft green
oxide. The plant life clung to all but the most unforgiving rock facings. Some
were fairly flat on top and were covered with only sparse vegetation; suitable
for an easy landing. He marked the area on the map.

One of the enormous flying things he’d been seeing almost daily
passed under at a tangent, then vanished into the treetops as if swallowed. He
estimated their wingspans at about three meters or greater. They seemed to
exist only in the deeper canyons. He’d once flown toward a flock of them; and
when he got too close, they vanished into the canopy as if they’d never
existed. He wanted to get close enough to one for a picture, but didn’t think
that would be possible in the shuttle.

So much life.

He buzzed another hillside, half of it seemingly cleft by a
chisel, then straightened and swung back on course. He brought his elevation
down to within a few meters of the canopy and raised his speed to seventy
knots, just a percentage or two from the craft’s maximum speed. The ship wasn’t
fast, but being that close to the treetops increased the sense of speed.

He wasn’t supposed to do that, either.

There was an enormous outcropping ahead and, to the west, jutting
up out of the basin like a fist. He just had to buzz that one. He banked toward
it and lit another cigarette.

He approached wide and banked hard around it, keeping his eyes out
the side port. He would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking.

“What the hell is this?”

It was there just at the base of the outcropping.

The structure reminded him of an old scar at the base of the hill,
fused and melded to it. The arms seemed to radiate from a central hub roughly
like the spokes of a wheel and bent snakelike around the larger obstructions.
The jungle had encroached over and through the thing, trying to reclaim its
space.

He pulled up, hovered, and then lowered the craft to get a closer
look.

The tentacles seemed to be made of a polished material that still
shone where the plant life hadn’t dulled or obscured those sections. He
realized when he got closer that the tube-like structures were actually made
of individual hexagonal pieces, like tiles, carefully laid in, each beside the
next, perfectly arched, to form the tentacle shapes.

Some of the pieces had fallen in, leaving gaping black holes and
cracks in the hollow structures. Other fissures were choked with erupting vines
and plant growth. A large section of one tentacle was completely collapsed.

He estimated that each tentacle was approximately five hundred
meters long and three or four meters in diameter. He counted ten of them
running like black snakes from the hub through the jungle. The ends of the ones
he could see were tapered, adding to the reptilian impression.

He took some pictures from that angle.

The hub itself formed a nearly perfect hemispherical dome. A
ragged hole gaped like a black mouth in the dead center of it.

When the thought took final shape in his mind, he was surprised
it hadn’t come sooner.

“Well, I’ll be damned. Of course.”

It was a skeleton; the shell of something that had once been
alive—some huge plant or plant-like animal that had grown out from the central
hub, snaking into the surrounding jungle as it grew.

“I gotta get a better look at this.”

He looked for a place to set down and found it about a hundred
meters from the hub in a spot where the jungle thinned.

He took a locator from the rack, put it in his pocket then
switched on the shuttle’s transponder. It was a policy he followed religiously
every time he planned on being out of sight of the shuttle. He knew you could
get hopelessly lost in terrain like this without even trying. Then, he slipped
into the second most important piece of equipment: a net suit. The insect life
was primarily nocturnal, and it
was
mid-morning, but he’d seen some nasty bugs that didn’t seem to care what time
of day it was when they got active. Betting it could be dark in the tentacle,
he pulled a lamp out its rack and put the strap over his shoulder.

The last two items were his pistol, a 12mm Arabian Falcon, and his
survival knife. He strapped them around his waist and cinched the belt tight.

He marched in the direction of the nearest arm, spreading vines
and branches out of the way as he went. He started to sweat and wished there
was an easy way to wipe his face with the net suit covering it.

When he got out of sight of the shuttle, he tuned the locator to
the shuttle’s transponder frequency and turned it on just to see the familiar
and comforting indicator come on as he swept the device toward the shuttle.

The arm was right about where he thought it should be. He walked
along it for some distance until he found a good-sized breech in it.

The walls of the structure were thicker than he’d expected. He pressed
against a ragged edge with both hands then leaned and pressed hard until one of
the tiles came loose with a crunch. It was light and porous but strong and
tough. He worked a few more pieces free until he thought he could easily slide
through the hole.

He went inside.

The holes in the sides and top of the structure let in plenty of
light, and he was tempted to leave the bulky lamp where it was, but decided
against it.

The arm was nearly cylindrical and the curved floor gave him the
feeling of walking through an enormous conduit or pipe. A few plants and vines
grew up through the floor then snaked out through the top or sides. He noticed
that there were circular openings along the arm on each side spaced every ten
or fifteen meters, just where the inside wall of the tentacle met the ground.
These openings varied in size from half a meter to well over two meters.

The tube was lined with straight pole-like vertical supports that
ran from the ceiling to the floor. They were evenly spaced, the texture of gnarled
and polished roots and very strong.

About fifty meters in, he rounded a bend and could see where the
arm emptied into the hub ahead.

Fascinated, he moved faster.

When he walked into the dome, it felt as if he’d walked into a
dark cathedral. The orange light from the sun poured in through the ragged tear
above, giving the chamber a strange and solemn cast. A swarm of insects spun
brightly in the light high, near the top.

It was quiet as death.

The other arms meshed smoothly with the hub, each gaping tunnel
entering at perfectly spaced intervals. The interior walls were virtually
featureless, but the same twisted, vertical supports, taller and thicker, were
scattered around the chamber, running from the top of the dome to the floor.
Some had smaller branches near the base that ran into the floor like roots. The
chamber was dominated by a large pit, some four or five meters across, directly
in the center of it. Shaped like a deep bowl, its rim was perfectly flush with
the floor. Above the pit was a tangle of what looked like thick roots that
seemed to have grown out of the wall as single shoots from several locations,
then opened out into a mass of smaller, intertwined vines like a nest directly
over the pit.