Scuzzworms (20 page)

“Remember, Pleister, stay near the ship.  If anything goes wrong, head straight for the hatch, even if it means leaving equipment and specimens behind.  I can send a mobile unit in later to clean up if necessary.  I want a minimal disturbance of the local ecology.  We go in fast; we leave fast.  Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.  Don’t worry.  If that monster down there turns out to have teeth, I’ll be the first one back to the ship.”

Camille laughed.  “Only if you can beat us there.”

#

The bog was heavily surrounded by wildlife.  Few creatures other than the worms actually entered the bog itself, but the feeder stream and surrounding semisentient vegetation teemed with chittering, yowling, hopping and snorting.

Now the scene was eerily silent, disturbed only by the waving of leafy vegetation in the occasional breeze.  Formerly darting forms lay in odd-angled repose, a few perching specimens hung upside-down, and even the grass had ceased its slow crawl. Imelda surveyed the scene through the monitor.

“All quiet.  You did a good job, Kellogg,” she radioed him, still unable to shake her unease.  “Our subject is located here,” she said, pointing to an area of mud.  “It hasn’t moved in a month. It’s still emitting heat so I assume that means that it’s still alive.

“Remember, we set up here,” she pointed to the closest edge of the bog, “and throw in the grapple.  My scanners say the borgette is thick-skinned so it should pull out without injury.  We don’t know anything about its internal organs so we’ll have to scan it fast above ground to pick our sites for needle biopsy.  We don’t dart it unless it we have to…the grapple will release an anesthetic into the mud if it gets anxious, and the gas should stop it when it surfaces.

“As soon as we have what we need, we antidote and let go.  I’m not sure about its respiratory system and it may die fast if its skin dries out.  A mud dweller that size can be expected to breathe through its skin as well as anywhere else that it can.  Post, you make sure that we don’t keep it out too long.  Questions?”

There were no questions except for unanswerable ones. They tensed in anticipation.

The engine altered its hum to accommodate as Lunders brought them down to the landing area.  Imelda watched through the monitor as their ship touched ground. A small amount of gas was still being released.  No beings reacted to their drop to the grou
nd, and the few worms that raised their tips at their arrival wriggled briefly and froze.

“Landing satisfactory.  Let’s go, guys.”  Imelda led them to the hatch and quickly cycled it open.  Lunders extruded the grapple and their equipment as they piled out. With a synchronized teamwork that belied the fact that they had never worked together before, they took their positions and extended the grapple towards their target, a large warm something under the mud.

Thus far everything had gone as planned.  Pleister stood nervously at his station next to the specimen bin reviewing its unfamiliar symbols.  Imelda stood with the others on the shore of the bog, watching the grapple arm’s slow movement forward.  She held the dart gun at ready.

The bog remained eerily quiet as they worked, dead-looking creatures scattered densely about its banks.  Only an occasional ripple of movement in the bodies gave evidence for life.

Suddenly, just as the grapple arm touched the murky surface, the bog erupted.  Numerous odd-looking creatures, mostly slimy and featureless, boiled out of the mud.  The scientists standing at the edge of the bog leapt back in shock and fear.  Pleister sped for the hatch, the biologists in hot pursuit.

Imelda lagged slightly behind.  “Wait,” she called,  “They’re running away from us.”

Indeed, the odd creatures were streaking away in panic.  Most didn’t get too far before keeling over from the gas.

“Quick, get one of them,” shouted Imelda.  “They may be baby borgettes!”

Camille and the others arrested their headlong flight, grabbed specimen nets and rushed to scoop up several of the nearest creatures.

“Yecch.  They’ve gotta be. Look.”  Grady held up a greenish slimeball with a few small yellow threads dangling beneath.  “It was eating the worms.  Nothing else here eats worms.”

“Ugh, throw it into the live-carrier.  We’ll biopsy and release when we’re through with our main operation.  Pull the idiot worms out of its mouth.  I don’t know how it breathes yet and there’s no need to let it choke to death before we find out.”

Post and the others followed suit.  Soon several dewormed slimeballs slept in the carrier.  Imelda, meanwhile, was amassing a worm collection.

“Why on earth are you doing that?” called Grady.  I thought those things had already been studied.”

“Food.  If we’re going to study little scuzzhogs they need to eat.  I’d like to watch their digestion before I let them go.” 

Grady groaned.  More and more of the worms were protruding portions of themselves into the tainted air, and they proved no more difficult to collect than gathering scattered noodles.

The small grabarm she used was soon dripp
ing green slime.  As she worked she thought furiously.  If she could only be certain that the smaller creatures were juvenile borgettes, then she could call off the more dangerous part of the exercise.    There was no way she could be sure, however.  The large borgette was warm-blooded.  These creatures were cold-blooded.  Only hard data would convince Biotech. 

She sighed.  “Okay, that’s enough.  The one we came for still hasn’t moved.  Let’s go get her.”

The large grapple still rested just at the mud’s surface.  “Stand back while we advance the arm.  None of those little guys showed up on my scanner.  We don’t know what else might be down there.”

The others didn’t need any prodding.  They all took places near the ship’s hatch.  The grapple slowly advanced again.  A few slightly larger slimeballs rocketed out in a squirming hurry.  One dropped after a few feet but the largest ones were quickly out of range of the gas cloud and continued groggily into the rocky surround.

“Get that one too.  Better trap as many as we can. I don’t want to have to do this again.”

Grady ambled over to seize the ungainly creature and dumped it, grunting, into a specimen holder.  “Ugly monster,” he muttered.  “Hey, one of the worms bit him!” he yelped, reaching in to yank the worm away.  It stilled as he held it up in the tainted air.  “No harm done, I guess. Little ugly is still breathing okay.  Stopped bleeding quickly, if that’s blood.  It’s hard to tell with all the slime.”

Imelda went over to examine the creature carefully.  It was considerably larger than the other specimens they had trapped.  It was oddly primitive in structure, vestigial extremities in segmental arrangement along an extremely plump body.  “Pleister, put him with the others, but label him separately.  He may be a different species.”

Once again, the grapple arm advanced.  Other than a few worms, nothing else popped out of the mud.  Finally, the grapple was within a foot of the borgette.

“Punch fast, Post, it’s starting to move!”  Imelda ordered, watching the ripple of activity on her infrared scanner.

The grapple arm jerked forward to seize on the mud beast, but before it could clamp firmly, the creature had swung itself up and out of the mud in a blur of speed.

As the scientists watched in amazement, the eight-ton creature exploded onto land, not quite formed fin-like protuberances lending themselves to flop-bellied locomotion.  The ground shook as in an earthquake.

“Quick, stun it!  It’s getting away!”  Imelda pulled the trigger even as Grady yelled.  The medication in the dart acted quickly, but this was a large beast and Imelda had no idea of the speed of its circulation or the degree of organization of its nervous system.  The dart’s needle looked more like a spear, designed as it was to pierce the meter
-thick skin.  Imelda grimaced as it slammed home into the center of its target.

They held their breath as the beast continued its rapid exit from the ship and the bog, thundering across the grassland.  A few grazing animals in the distance, themselves more than a ton in weight, came nearer, looking as though to join in the excitement.

“Quick, into the ship!  Let’s follow it!  I got a good hit; it should drop any minute!” Imelda called as she dashed for the hatch.  She hoped none of them would ask how long a minute she meant.  Equipment and manpower piled into the vessel.  Lunders lifted off and they surged after the borgette.

As they neared the raging borgette, they could see that the
grazing animals had reached it and were forming a cacophonous circle of protection.  Several avians swooped in, screeching towards the ship.

Imelda could see the undulations of the borgette’s forward motion slowing.  The trail of green slime that marked its path was thinning.  “
Darwin be damned, where did all the reinforcements come from?  Have we got any aerosol on board, Lunders?” she asked.

The pilot was wild
-eyed.  “Yes, for twenty minutes.  If that’s all of them.  I can’t make too big a cloud.  A big monster moving fast could get through to us.”

Imelda frowned.  “We have no choice.  The borgette needs an ant
idote.  It’s almost stopped now so let’s mist ‘em fast.  We’ll need to scan the borgette on the run, get whatever tissue we can.”

“Twenty minutes should be enough.  I don’t see any ot
her herds near enough to interfere,” said Post.

The ship closed in on the loud excitement below, its aerosol repeating its previous devastation of the ranks.  The lar
ger animals were slower to fall but they did not try to escape.  As the last of the large grazers stumbled to the ground, the ship landed.  Imelda and the others piled out.

“Oh, lord.  This must be the ugliest monster ever spawned.  Something like this shouldn’t be allowed to live!” Grady groaned disgustedly.

Imelda plunged ahead with the scanner and placed it against the massive belly.  She was glad that she was on tanked air.  Every one of her other senses said the beast must stink to high heaven.

The do
rsal surface was lightly fuzzed with a thick dark skin showing through.  The belly of the beast was moist, pitted, with cavernous crypts extending into the flesh.  As the flesh heaved, misted gas could be seen to puff out of the crypts, from which a thin fluid dripped. The entire front was caked with drying slime, and soft rubbery lips surrounded the mouth, through which brown stained teeth could be seen.  The rear was mostly a long slit surrounded by black wrinkled flesh.    

The scan was difficult to interpret.  The thick skin made the scanner images unclear.  There seemed to be a series of small or
gans of low density posteriorly and a few hollow ones toward the midline.  Most of the cavity of the beast was filled with two massive organs that weighed over a ton each, of obscure purpose.  Grady busily guided the biopsy needle into the various structures that Imelda found while Camille similarly collected fluid from the cavities and blood vessels.

“Hey, something’s wrong,” called Post.

“What do you mean?” Imelda asked, instantly alarmed.

“Core temperature’s dropping.  It had a few respiratory
-like movements when we first got here but they’ve stopped.  I can’t find an orifice that looks like a nose or windpipe and my scanner can’t identify lungs.  I can’t verify that the thing’s breathing.”

Camille interrupted. “Circulation’s slowing.  I th
ink there’s three hearts and they are all doing overtime. Either lack of oxygen or fluid loss.”

“Fun’s over, pull out and let’s wake her up.  Use the grapple to pull her upright so she can breathe easier when she comes to.  These orifices on her belly may be for ventilation so we need to expose them.”

Imelda was already heading back to the ship and the others were close behind.  She waited until they were inside the hatch to loose the dart containing the antidote.  The grapple arm had already latched on and was turning the beast over.

“Oh my god,” she whispered.

Over the intercom she heard retching noises.  Her own stomach twisted in revulsion.  Worms were busily devouring the half of the borgette that had touched the ground.  As the body shifted, obscenely fat worms dropped away from the carcass of what had once been their specimen.  The ground was boiling beneath as millions of worms of all sizes groped blindly for the feast.

“Come on gang, let’s get our specimens.  No need to waste the opportunity.”

Imelda dashed back, grabbing a laser scalpel from the toolkit as she went.  The others were much slower to follow.

She climbed quickly to the top of a hoist to get a good downward angle with the laser.  It was forbidden to po
int the laser at the horizon since one might inadvertently slice through something a mile away.  As she made the first incision into the body, she turned to glance back.  “Come on guys.  The worms were here first.  There won’t be anything left if we don’t move fast.”

The worms exposed to the
aerosol when the beast rolled over were stilled, but the carcass jerked as others worked busily underneath.  Grady, Camille, and Post staggered out to join her but Pleister hung back.

“What’s wrong, Pleister?  I need some specimen containers now!  Get busy!”

A muffled voice answered her.  “I, I threw up in my suit,” he gasped.  How do I clean it up?”  Another retching noise told her that he wasn’t finished dirtying it.