Umma clutched her husband’s hand as the Cochran bucked and rattled into the ionization stage of descent. She wondered if he could feel her worry through the insulated gloves, but he squeezed back and turned just enough so that she could see his wide grin and exaggerated wink through the helmet visor. He mouthed something. Only the flight crew had inter-suit communications during this phase, but she knew what he said and had to smile.
“We were born for this!”
The phrase annoyed the hell out of her, and he’d said it thousands of times during their twenty-one-year trip. Ian and Umma had both left Earth at sixteen and met on the flight, but for their daughter Rachel, who had been born en route, the words were true. Still, he was right to be excited. Umma took a deep breath, turned so she couldn’t see the fire beyond the viewports and tried to ignore her feeling of impending doom.
She’d just started to relax when her pressure suit tightened abruptly, her visor fogged and she felt a distinct change in the vibration resonance. Even through the quivering condensation, she could see flashing red lights and frantic activity on the flight dais. She clenched Ian’s fingers tight and started to hyperventilate.
From his docking cup atop Umma’s helmet, Goober, her softball-sized personal AI, read the spikes in her vitals and tried to calm her.
“We’re going to be fine, Umma. Some of the seals failed, and we’re losing cabin pressure, but the heat shields are still protecting us. This is why you wear pressure suits during descent and launch. Now slow your breathing and let your gasses balance or you’ll black out.”
Umma thought about Rachel and Ian and the home they planned to build on their new world. It helped—some—and her breathing slowed. As she regained control, the descent smoothed out, and the fire beyond the viewports faded. Ian squeezed her hand and smiled through his visor again.
“We can talk now, darlin’. Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine once we’re safe on solid ground.”
“Awwww, don’t be too hard on Cochran. Considering she’s been nothing more than a frozen zit on Sinacola’s butt for twenty-eight years, I think she’s performed admirably.”
Umma laughed. “Well, we’re not down yet.”
The Cochran had been tested extensively before she’d left the main ship, but equipment failures had increasingly plagued the Sinacola during the past ten years of their trip, so they expected the worst. And the little survey ship had to work, because the Sinacola, with its three thousand colonists, needed a two-stage braking assist—a close pass by the elliptically orbiting gas giant named LongFellow and then the star itself—before she would slow enough to enter orbit around Epsilon Eridani Two. The Cochran and her twelve-person crew were committed the instant they left the main ship two weeks earlier. They would be isolated until Sinacola returned four months later.
As the Cochran slowed and neared the selected landing site, Scooby, Ian’s AI, produced a monitor pane so they could see their new home. Vast rolling prairies, punctuated by occasional lakes or small forests, extended in every direction. Huge herds—some spanning twenty or thirty kilometers—grazed on the grassy terrain. This is how the American plains must have looked before Europeans arrived, Umma thought.
The flight commander started a reverse countdown that ended in a gentle thump when they touched down. Umma immediately felt the higher gravity. The spin on Sinacola had been gradually increased to 119 percent of Earth normal, to acclimate the colonists, but she had just spent two weeks in microgravity and felt suddenly made of lead.
A cheer erupted. The Cochran was not designed to fly back to orbit, so this was now home. The crew had planned to stay inside the ship and do nothing but atmospheric and soil tests on the first day, but Ian immediately made a case to take the two-man sled outside and start their work. As the colony’s chief xenobiologist, his arguments carried weight. He dragged Commander Darroch to the still-open monitor pane and pointed to the huge herd approaching their landing site.
“We’ve analyzed atmosphere samples returned by the probes for years. We’re not going to find anything new, and we know we can breathe it. What we don’t know enough about is these animals that will soon be all around us. Besides, we’re not leaving, so we might as well get started figuring out how to live here.”
The Commander grinned and crossed his arms. “We already discussed this, Ian. We have a timeline and need to stick to it. We need to do contamination studies. And we still don’t know why those rovers shut down.”
“Why? We’ve already vented to the atmosphere during descent, and the chances of any local bacteria being able to hurt us are infinitesimal. Besides, that argument was made and lost forty years ago, when humanity decided to send colonists to Donnie Two instead of more study probes. We couldn’t abort when the rovers died, and we can’t abort now. Where else can we go?”
Commander Darroch looked at the animals on the monitor for a couple of seconds and then shrugged. “Fine. You’re the biologists. Knock yourselves out, but at least wear sealed field suits.”
Their open two-person flier lifted away from the Cochran, and the equipment airlock sealed behind them just as the herd arrived. The natives were not in the slightest bit afraid of the invading spacecraft and immediately surrounded it. The large herd animals looked like elephant-sized caterpillars. They were all covered by a seething second skin of little hooked frog-like animals that immediately started leaping from their hosts to land on the Cochran.
Rachel had been the first to see the returned probe video and had dubbed them “frogvarks.” The fist-sized animals had jumping legs like those of a frog and a stiff, tapered proboscis resembling an aardvark’s. It’d been funny then, but they gave Umma chills now.
Within seconds, they had covered the Cochran in such numbers that her features were rendered blurry and indistinct.
“Astounding,” Ian said with childlike wonder. “I wish Rachel could see this.”
The comment stung Umma, but shouldn’t have. She knew Ian didn’t mean he would have preferred Rachel’s company to hers, yet she and Rachel had argued bitterly about that very subject before the survey team had departed the Sinacola. Rachel had always worshiped her father and wanted to be with him when he saw their new world for the first time, but the team could only take two biologists. Umma had refused to give up her place next to Ian and it had infuriated Rachel.
“Look at that,” Ian said. “With them swarming strange objects like that, I can see why our ground rovers all died minutes after touching down. Let’s get a little closer, but stay out of frogvark jumping range.”
Before Umma could act, ten or twelve of the largest herd animals raised up, lifting perhaps two-thirds of their lengths into the air, and hundreds of frogvarks launched toward them like invaders from siege towers. They hit Umma ten or twelve at a time, shotgun blasts of hooked horrors that adhered to everything. Their claws sank into her neck, back, and arms, not actually puncturing the field suit’s rubbery fabric but pinching the skin beneath like sharp, miniature vises.
She batted and pounded at the little gray beasts, but forcefully pulling them off was the only effective strategy. Her suit integrity held, but alarms sounded as skin sealant and painkillers were pumped through the damaged inner layers. She looked back at Ian, in the flier’s passenger seat, hoping for help, but he was fighting them too.
“Goober, help me!”
The little AI darted around the flier, burning the aliens with microwave emitters normally used for communication. His power indicator flickered red after every concentrated burst, but he didn’t slow down. Each dislodged attacker left behind a moving white powder. Lice. They hadn’t been able to see more than moving white dots from the aerial probes, but Ian had dubbed them frogvark lice, even though they seemed to infest every living thing on the planet.
Ian slapped her shoulder. “Go up,” he said through the commlink. “Get us out of their range!”
Another volley landed and latched onto Umma, but she gritted her teeth, fought the pain and tried to focus. With a tug on the control yoke, the flier leapt upward. A quick slap engaged the hover lock, and with a squeal of pain, Umma yanked a jumper from her neck, crushed it to pulp and flung it groundward.
One by one, Umma pulled the aliens off. The remnant lice raced up and down her limbs, stopping and abruptly changing direction, testing every seam and seal as if looking for a way to leak in. She called to Ian but received only grunts in answer.
When she glanced back, she saw why. He had slipped from his seat and was writhing on the flier’s deck, all but buried in clinging aliens. Both AIs darted in and out, burning and bumping, until in a display of concerted effort, four frogvarks launched into the air, hit Scooby simultaneously and held on. The little AI burned one with microwave emitters, but it remained attached, and amid the high-pitched whine of useless lifting fans, Scooby dropped from sight.
Ian thrashed around, slapping at frogvarks and clawing at his helmet. His wide eyes darted around behind the visor. Umma had never seen him panic and that frightened her more than the attack. She initiated a link with his suit and the gas numbers told the story. He was suffocating. His helmet’s air intake filters must be coated with the white lice, she realized.
“Damn it, Goober, help me,” she screamed. “Clear Ian’s filters! Hurry!”
Goober darted to the mesh panels on Ian’s helmet and, using his emitters, turned the white swirls into ash that still clogged the intake screens.
She sent the order to change Ian’s filter purge settings, but got an error.
“Goober! His suit won’t let me change the purge settings!”
“It’ll give you passive information, but only Ian or Scooby can change the parameters.”
She reached back and grabbed Ian’s leg. “—Listen to me! Your breather purge default is at fifty percent, you have to change it to ninety percent long enough to clear your filters! Ian! Change your purge!”
He clawed at the visor, and his face turned crimson. She could hear him gasping and choking, but he never gave the command. Instead, in a move so quick and unexpected that Umma couldn’t stop him, Ian released his helmet seal. The visor popped open.
With a long, shuddering gasp, he became the first human to breathe the atmosphere on Epsilon Eridani Two. Before he could take a second breath, the organisms poured into his helmet like bathwater down a drain. They entered his mouth, slipped under his eyelids, and streamed up his nose like a pale, backward nosebleed. On his face, they burrowed into the skin, leaving a field of blood-welling pinpricks.
“Ian!” Umma scraped and swatted at them, trying to stem the tide, but only made it worse as new swarms poured down her gloves and onto his face.
“Call the Cochran, Goober! We have to get him inside.”
“He’s contaminated. We all are. They won’t let us in.”
Ian thrashed and cursed and clawed at his face.
“Just call them, dammit! Inform them of our situation and . . . and get help.”
Ian’s medical stats scrolled down the screen inside her visor, showing elevated heart rate, blood pressure and temperature. The suit had already given him the maximum painkiller load, but it had yet to kick in. He jerked and squirmed beneath her.
“Ian! Hold on, sweetie.”
An alert sounded from his suit. He’d dropped into unconsciousness, but still thrashed from the pain.
Goober cut in. “Cochran doesn’t respond. I’m continuing to ping on all standard channels.”
Ian started jerking violently and slid over the side. His safety tether prevented him from falling to the ground, but he dangled precariously from the fan strut. The added weight on a single fan unbalanced the flier, tipping it nearly onto its side. Unstowed gear and dead frogvarks fell fifty feet into the churning herd below. If not for her own tether, Umma would have followed.
The flight computers tried to compensate for the imbalance and electric motors whined in protest as the starboard fans strained in vain to right the flier. The little craft went into a slow, descending spin.
Umma stretched but couldn’t reach her husband. “Ian! Can you hear me? Give me your hand.”
He didn’t respond, but instead shook violently. The screen showed he was experiencing a grand mal seizure. She grabbed the sampling pole, hooked it on his belt and pulled, but he was too heavy. She had no leverage.
Goober hovered near her face. “Umma, the compensators are using all the power on stabilization. We need to shed some weight or we’re going to crash.”
“I can’t get him back up here by myself. What the hell should I do?”
“We’re close to the ground. He should survive the fall, and he’s already infested. It’s an acceptable risk.”
She braced against the seat and pulled on the pole, but Ian didn’t budge. “Acceptable risk?”
“You may be the only crew member not compromised. You have to stay alive until the Sinacola returns,” Goober said and turned his microwave beam on Ian’s strap.
“Goober! No!”
She swung the sampling pole and hit Goober solidly, sending plastic shards into the air. The little AI whirled and sparked, then dropped like a brick. For the first time since receiving him on her twelfth birthday, all links between Umma and Goober flickered out.
Frogvarks launched from the herd beast’s backs and landed all over Umma and the flier. Dozens flew through the fans, degrading the lift even more. Within seconds, the drooping fan pod hit the ground with a bang, and the jolt sent Umma over the side. The flier spun around, dragging Umma and Ian in a spiral path over rocks and squirming frogvarks. Umma detached her tether and rolled to a stop, hoping that the sled could regain altitude and take Ian with it.
The flier, suddenly lighter, lifted back into the air and spun away over the herd. She scrambled to her feet but was surrounded by big herd beasts. She quickly lost sight of Ian.
“Shit,” she said as thousands of frogvarks crashed down on her like a living tsunami. And this time, through tears in the suit or separated seals, the little white bastards found their way inside.
They filled the void between her suit and skin, then started burrowing. Umma thought childbirth had been the ultimate agony, but immediately realized she had never really known true pain.
A gentle rain on Umma’s face woke her from dreams of suffocation. She gasped and then groaned. Everything hurt. She opened crusty eyes but instantly closed them again. The stabbing pain in her head made even the pre-dawn gloom unbearable. Each breath felt like swallowing broken glass. Every inch of skin felt covered with hot coals. Yet, even in her agony, she appreciated the cool drizzle.
Deep in her consciousness, she knew an open helmet was bad, but couldn’t remember why it was open. She extended a dry, swollen tongue. The rain tasted like old socks, but she didn’t care.
Over the next few minutes, her memory returned in shreds and flickers. When she recalled the attack and the crash, she opened her eyes and jerked upright.
“Ian!”
The effort produced very little sound and much agony, but she fought it and focused on Ian long enough to look around. She sat in a muddy patch of Fozzy grass. It was more a tall, fuzzy fern than actual grass, but it seemed to cover most of the ground in this world. The big herd animals surrounded her on all sides, their lamprey-like mouths pressed to the ground as they grazed. An underlying sound, like a thousand snorting horses, filled the air, punctuated by an occasional meowing sound; so familiar, yet vastly different from the herds on Earth. Oddly enough, the accompanying smell was not unpleasant, but sweet and rich—like a baking cake.
The little hooked monsters crawled all over Umma and the surrounding ground, with the tiny lice crawling over everything in between. She started brushing at her face and pounding on her arms, slapping them wherever she saw a patch. Her gasping triggered a coughing fit, which produced sputum filled with the white parasites. The sight and realization repulsed her. She must be filled with them, just like Ian.
Panic seized her. She started screaming, clawing and slapping at the things on her face. The pain flared and increased until she couldn’t breathe. She fell into a heaving lump, rolled on her side and vomited.
After lying still for a while, the newly inflicted pain went away. Almost as if it had been a punishment. She checked her suit’s power level. The batteries were nearly drained. She considered turning it on, just long enough to dispense the pain-killing drugs, but she feared she or Ian might need them more later.
Lying in the grass, staring at pale blue sky between thinning clouds—a sight that wasn’t in the least bit alien—the truth came to her suddenly, like a stab in the heart. If the crew in the lander could help, they would already have arrived. Even switched off, her suit would notify her if she had incoming radio calls. It had detected none while she slept.
A frogvark plopped down next to the opening in her helmet and she got her first look at one up close. Between the pointy beak and the big jumping legs were six small limbs, three per side, ending in the tiny sharp claws they used to cling to their hosts.
It scratched and scrambled for a grip on her rain-slick helmet, then hunkered down and opened gill-like flaps on its sides. The little white things filed out in long, snaking lines, like sightseers from a passenger shuttle, and streamed into her helmet.
She, Rachel and Ian had watched nearly thirty hours of early probe video footage showing the frogvarks, the herd beasts and the lice. There had been long rambling discussions about the strange and complex symbiotic relationships between the local animal species, yet none of them had clocked the tiny parasite’s aggressive tendencies.
With a shiver, she brushed the frogvark off. Pain washed over her again, making her gasp and squirm, but she refused to give in. She thought about her daughter, now twenty. Rachel was a self-sufficient adult, but she still needed her parents. Umma had to live, for Rachel, and for Ian.
The torment subsided after a few seconds and another jumper arrived. She let this one unload in peace and tried to observe as much as she could. Her survival—and possibly Ian’s—might depend on it.
As the sun crept higher and the mist burned away, Umma gently detached as many frogvarks as possible, then stood up on wobbly legs. The herd spread out in every direction, a living sea, perfectly adapted to a prairie world. The big animals processed the grasses and, in doing so, produced food for the other organisms. Ian had always wondered why they had seen so few large species on this world. Umma thought that maybe they had just not been needed, that the ecological niches were filled so well the other species had either died out or been killed off.
A frogvark carpet covered each beast, some crawling around, some tightly attached with sharp beaks buried in their hosts, others arriving or leaving, bound for other nearby animals. The hustle and bustle resembled the spaceport the day they had departed Earth.
As if they’d been waiting for Umma to rise, the herd began moving all at once. She dodged them, at first worried that the lumbering monsters would crush her, but the herd parted and moved around her like she was a rock in a stream. On stiff, sore legs and fully feeling this world’s extra gravity, she moved against the flow, hoping to get clear and start searching for Ian. This time the pain came in a flash that took her breath, but only affected her front side. The harder she tried to move forward, the more intense the fire. She stopped and took a step backward and the pain lessened, then started in her right side. She moved away from the pain, in the same direction as the herd, and the sensation went away. When she stopped moving it started again, this time in her back, pushing her forward. The little bastards were driving her!
A chime sounded inside her helmet, announcing an incoming radio communication. Her heart leapt into her throat. With trembling hands she powered up the suit.
“Come in Cochran! Can you read me?”
“Umma? Are you there?”
She recognized the voice—Ian’s AI.
“Scooby! Where are you?”
“I’m with Ian. He’s alive but I can’t communicate with him. His suit power is off, his visor is open. But I can’t get close enough to dock with his helmet. Can you help?”
Ian was alive! She felt suddenly stronger and determined.
“Where is he?”
“On the ground, still attached to the flier. We’re surrounded by a large herd that just started moving.”
“According to the directional finder, you are about six hundred yards toward the rear of the herd. Fly straight up and flash your strobe.”
She strained her eyes, until she saw a bright pinprick flash in the distance.
“I see you. Stay there and keep flashing. My suit batteries are low, so I’m going to shut it down, but I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
“I’ll flash once per minute. Please hurry. I’m worried about Ian.”
She waited for another flash, then started toward it. The pain in her front grew steadily until she couldn’t stand it. She stopped, gasping, with tears trickling down her cheeks, but refused to go in the direction they demanded. Instead, she turned and started walking sideways, making them shift their pain. It amazed her how quickly the little monsters could communicate. In order to inflict such instant and widespread discipline, they must work in concert and do it quickly.
She continued this strategy, expecting any minute to feel the body-warping agony she knew they could produce, but it never came. At some point the herd stopped and young centipede beasts—some only waist high—moved to block her path. With patience and determination, she moved around and between them, her forward progress slowed, but she refused to stop.
They tried a different tack. The frogvarks swarmed, covering her until their added weight began to drag her down. She stopped to rest every few minutes, but kept going. Then a herd beast picked her up with its soft, fleshy maw and carried her for nearly an hour, oblivious to her pounding. When it finally set her down, she immediately continued her trek.
She had just skirted a stand of swampy water filled with dense, woody reeds when she saw the flier less than a hundred yards away. Scooby came down closer. Frogvarks immediately started jumping, trying to reach him, but he stayed well out of range and sent her another message. She powered up her suit.
“I established contact with Porky on the Cochran twenty-one minutes ago. He says his charge, Maggie Torres, is still alive but comatose. He needs your help to get her into the MockDoc vat.”
Umma’s throat tightened as the statement sank in. What did he mean by still alive? And why would Porky need Umma’s help to get Maggie into the AI medical unit? “Get a status on the rest of the crew, Scooby.”
“He says they’re all dead. Three died from trauma induced by parasitic infestation, which caused an encephalitis-like condition. Four suffered heart failure and two bled to death.”
Umma fought back the tears and panic. With a renewed sense of urgency, she hurried the last thirty yards to Ian.
She found him next to the smashed flier, tangled in his tether. He was pale. His eyes twitched beneath the lids. Blood trickled from his nose. She touched his cheek with trembling hands and his eyes opened. The pupils weren’t evenly dilated. One looked milky and bruised. He mumbled.
“It’s me, sweetie. It’s Umma. Can you hear me?”
He licked his lips and spoke with a raspy, shallow voice. “Hey, darlin’”
“Thank God. Just hang on, sweetie, and we’ll get you back to the ship.”
“I came all this way . . . to see alien critters and I’m missin’ it.”
She stroked his face and said, “There’ll be plenty of time later.”
“Don’t kill them. They didn’t know.” Then he closed his eyes and mumbled again. “—born for this.”
She picked up his gloved hand with both of hers and held it against her cheek, but he had dropped into unconsciousness.
“We have an audience,” Scooby said.
The hair on her neck prickled when she looked up. Herd beasts were arrayed around them in a neat ring. The big animals, and every frogvark attached to them, turned their “faces” toward Umma. And the big animals did have something akin to a face, a wide flat spot, near the ground, just above the mouth, where three round depressions covered with soft skin vibrated like drums.
They were quiet. All the beasts had stopped eating. Even the young ones were still and peered placidly from between the adults.
Scooby said, “MockDoc wants to talk with you. He says he helped Porky kill the parasites in Maggie.”
Hope flared in her again. She glanced in the direction of the Cochran but could see only grazing herd animals. She forced patience and settled down in the grass next to Ian. “Stay above me and relay the conversation, Scooby. I don’t want to waste my power. Ask him what he did.”
“He says each of the adult lice carry a tiny crystal under their carapace. Through testing, he found the sonic frequency for making the crystals vibrate. He had hoped to drive them out of Maggie, but it killed them instantly.”
“That’s good news,” Umma said. “We can finally fight back.”
“He says we can’t kill those infesting you or Ian. It will leave your bodies filled with millions of lice carcasses, which will cause infections throughout your systems. Ian would not survive it, and your chances would be very slim. He doesn’t expect Maggie to last long now.”
Umma cursed under her breath and looked around at the herd again. They seemed to be waiting for her. If it was her move, then she would sure as hell make one. She left Ian long enough to collect several stout, woody reeds. With the knife and carbon wire from her field kit, she started building a travois.
“Tell Doc and the other AIs to come up with some way to drive these things out without killing us. We have hundreds of years of human technology at our disposal; surely they can come up with something. Try chemicals, temperature extremes, anything. In the meantime, I’m bringing Ian back to the ship.”
When Umma started forward with the travois, her tormentors tried driving her with pain again, but she employed the same tactics of turning the other cheek, a difficult task while pulling Ian. Several times, she was forced to stop entirely when they visited her entire body with pain. Still, after each episode, she kept moving toward the ship. It was slow, exhausting and agonizing, but once they cleared the leading edge of the herd she could see the Cochran in the distance, easily the tallest thing on the horizon. It buoyed her determination and picked up her pace. The herd followed close behind, but Umma was finally calling the shots.
“Umma! Check Ian.”
She stopped and lowered the travois handles. Ian was writhing and twisting against the tether she’d used to secure him to the frame. He uttered whimpers and grunts. When she knelt next to him, he immediately stopped, relaxing back into unconsciousness.
She looked up at Scooby, still flying above and ahead of her, out of frogvark range. “He doesn’t look good. Anything new from Doc?”
“No,” he answered. “But I think we need to hurry.”
“I know,” she said and picked up the handles again. The instant she did, Ian groaned and twisted in pain. She put the travois down and he relaxed.
“The little fuckers are using Ian to control me!”
She paced, circling Ian, muttering and cursing under her breath. The herd waited, the large animals grazed and ignored her again, but frogvarks continued to arrive and depart. Seeing the ship so close made her frustration even greater. All kinds of crazy ideas roared through her exhausted mind, but nothing sane enough to try.
Scooby came down close to her head, easily within attack range, but this time the frogvarks ignored him. “You just said they’re using Ian to manipulate you. Do you realize what that implies? Their making that kind of connection between you and Ian shows an amazing degree of sentience. Animals are not capable of such abstract ideas.”
“Of course they’re intelligent,” she said, brushing frogvarks aside so she could sit on the ground next to Ian. “And they’re being deliberately evil. That’s even worse.”
“Perhaps you just don’t understand their motives.”
She ignored him and watched the lice move up and down Ian’s chest in clumps and long snaking lines. They were organized and they communicated en masse almost instantaneously. Did they have psychic abilities? A network? What of the crystals Porky had discovered?
“Scooby? Do you think the lice could communicate via a kind of radio signal using those crystals? Maybe some kind of vast distributed network?”
“It’s possible. There’s a low-level static that dominates the lower frequency range here.”
Umma groaned in response to her sore muscles and joints as she struggled back to her feet. “Can you create a jamming signal? Or better yet, a directional EMP blast?”
“I don’t have the power to generate an EMP, but the Cochran has the materials needed to build a device. Jamming, I can do. Finding the right frequency might take awhile, but I could just start at one end and cycle every second until we find something or run out of spectrum. It will be power intensive, so I may have to do it in stages.”
“If they do communicate and coordinate via radio signals, do you think disrupting that would kill them? I don’t want the same situation as MockDoc’s sonic experiment.”
“Seems unlikely, but I don’t know. You’re the biologist.”
Umma looked around at the herd and the distant Cochran, then down at Ian. “Do it. We have to do something and don’t seem to be making much progress by just standing here.”
Scooby positioned himself out of range, but above Umma and Ian, emitting a low-level hum. His power light immediately flickered red, and he dipped a little lower as he stole power from his fans, but he didn’t stop. Nothing happened for several minutes, then in the blink of an eye she felt millions of pinpricks inside and outside her body. Black spots filled her vision and she dropped to her knees. Her lungs constricted. Her throat and nose burned, making her cough and retch. Clear drool, mixed with red and white swirls, dripped from her open mouth as she gasped for breath. Then it ended as quickly as it had started.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Scooby said. “They communicate on a higher frequency than I would’ve thought.”
Umma was gasping, trying to get back onto her feet, but she noticed the lice on her arms milling in confused circles. Individuals, almost too small to focus on, looked like tiny drunks, staggering around and bumping into each other. It made her smile.
“Take that you little bastards,” she mumbled and brushed them off without the punishing pain. Then, even as she looked around at the surrounding chaos—confused herd beasts, panicked frogvarks, and disorganized lice—she realized it had failed. The tiny parasites had lost their cohesive organization, but the majority she hosted had not left her body.
Taking advantage of the pandemonium, Scooby swooped down and docked with Ian’s helmet. The visor immediately closed and the suit power came on. Then Ian and the attached travois bounced. At first, Umma didn’t realize what she was seeing. Scooby’s power light blinked red, and as soon as it turned green, Ian bounced again—automated defibrillation via his field suit.
“Ian!” She dropped to her knees next to him and tried to open the visor.
“Don’t touch him!” Scooby said, then added, “Clear!”
Ian jumped again.
The process repeated three more times, leaving Scooby’s status lights dark after the last attempt. Lice crawled all over the AI’s shell.
“Scooby?” She detached the motionless AI from Ian’s helmet and set it aside, then opened Ian’s visor. His eyes were closed and his expression calm. He was still as sculpted stone.
She yanked her helmet off and pressed her face to his. Twenty-one years of memories welled in her; the day they met, the first night they spent together, those quiet afternoons napping, their daughter, the dinners, the friends, the plans.
“Ian. Please don’t leave me.”
Her chest and throat felt crushed—she could barely breathe—but the tears wouldn’t come.
Lice patches, obviously having reorganized, covered her husband, and large numbers were clustered around the travois joints she had wired together. Seeing them infuriated her. When the herd came close—watching—it was suddenly all too much.
“You fucking monsters,” she screamed. The loud noise affected them like a pressure wave; they all jerked back at once. With rage-fueled strength, she pulled a reed loose from the rattle-trap travois and swung it like a Louisville Slugger, striking a lead beast square in the face. She wheeled, batted, and pounded, crushing thirty or forty frogvarks before her strength failed and she slumped to the ground.
Then the tears came.
Through blurry eyes, she saw Scooby hovering before her face, covered with crawling lice. But alive.
“Go away,” she snapped.
“Please deactivate me now,” he said.
She covered her ears, curled into a ball, and lay for a long time as the same ugly thought kept surfacing through her anguish. Rachel had worshiped her father. Umma would have to bear the brunt of her daughter’s pain and anger. In losing Ian, she had probably also lost her daughter.
Awhile later, Scooby bumped her. “You’re almost to the Cochran. You can see it from here. You don’t need me. I have no function now that—”
She shoved her grief aside, sat up, grabbed the little AI and shook him. “Stop it, Scooby! That’s a direct order. You’re still alive—just like me—and you’re stuck with that responsibility. You can’t abandon Sinacola’s colonists just because Ian’s dead! They need you. There’s too much at stake. Ian gave his life to see this world and these . . . damned animals. That should mean something to you.”
Umma sat for a moment, staring at the blinking AI in her fist and considering her words, then released him and wiped her eyes.
“Those damned animals have built a travois,” Scooby said from beyond her reach.
“What?”
“They’ve built a new travois. A better one.”
She turned toward Ian, who lay on the frame she had half torn apart. Another travois—built from the same kind of reeds—lay beside him. On hands and knees, she crawled the short distance and examined the gift. It was roughly the same dimensions as her design, but the crossbars tying the assembly together were bonded with a flexible, plastic-like putty. The whole frame was quite sturdy and could not be pulled apart.
“Porky called while you were . . . incapacitated,” Scooby said. His little speaker sounded deflated and tinny. “Maggie died too.”
“Tell him—” Umma ran her fingers along Ian’s face and then sighed. “Tell him I’m sorry.”
Sudden doubts crept into her thoughts. Ian had been stable before the jamming. Had the parasites been keeping him alive? Would he still be alive if she had left them alone? And if she had instead left Ian and rushed back to the ship to help get Maggie into the MockDoc vat, would she have survived? Umma sat down and ran shaking hands through matted hair. All she wanted was to mourn Ian, to hold her daughter, but she didn’t know when or if that would ever happen.
“The MockDoc wants to talk to you when you’re able.”
She took a deep breath and then struggled to her feet. “Okay.”
“I’m patching him through.”
“Umma,” Doc said in his wizened male voice through Scooby’s speaker, “I’m sorry about Ian. Are you hurt? Are you going to be able to make it back to the ship on your own?”
She sighed and looked around. The herd had left about a twenty-yard buffer around her. The path to the ship was clear. “I can see the Cochran from here. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I’ve informed the Sinacola of your situation. Of course, they want to talk to you as soon as you’re able.”
“My suit is dead. I’ll call them when I get back to the ship. Tell Rachel . . . that I’m sorry.”
“Will do.”
She strapped Ian to the new rig, then picked up the handles and started walking. The little bastards were still crawling all over and through Umma, but this time they didn’t try to stop her.
She took a deep breath and opened the hatch leading to the control cabin. Her friends, people she had known for more than half her life, lay scattered on the deck and draped over chairs. The knowledge of their deaths hadn’t prepared her for seeing them that way.
A cloud of AIs lifted into the air from their places of vigil near their dead mates and immediately launched into a plaintive chorus.
“Please deactivate me.”
“This is too much, please turn me off.”
“Jacque is dead. Please deactivate me.”
She inhaled, preparing to yell at them to be quiet, and instead just raised a hand. They eventually stopped. “I’m sorry. I know what you’re feeling, but you can’t deactivate. I need your help. We have work to do. We . . . can’t just leave everyone like this.”
She left them hovering and limped across the cabin to the storage hold hatch in the floor. One rung at a time, she eased herself down, then, at the bottom, sat to rest before looking for the body bags.
She woke eleven hours later, oddly twisted, with one numb arm and a Medical Diagnostic Unit strapped to the other. Her stomach demanded food, and her muscles would barely move, but she resumed her search. Scooby reminded her repeatedly that messages from the Sinacola were waiting, but working was easier. She couldn’t face Rachel yet.
She removed the frogvarks, but could do nothing about the lice, so she sealed Ian and the rest of the crew into bags along with their parasites and moved them to storage. She cleaned up the dried blood and vomit, then showered and ate.
With her excuses all gone, she stood before the communications console, not wanting to talk to anyone, especially Rachel. Lice crawled in and out of the equipment racks, from behind panels and through cooling vents.
“So why are the electronics still working with these things gumming up the works?”
Scooby floated nearby and answered. “Porky says they seem to avoid the actual electricity, including circuit cards of running equipment. So we leave it running. They have had mixed results with operating devices that have been powered down.”
Since Umma didn’t know how long they could count on the electronics, communicating with the Sinacola now, while she still could, suddenly seemed like a good idea. For over an hour, Umma listened to recorded messages from the Sinacola. First, she heard the pleas for clarification after they received chaotic and panicked calls from the survey team. Then replies to messages from various AIs, reporting the deaths of their charges. The last recording was from the mission commander.
“Hang in there, Umma. The MockDoc sent your status while you were sleeping to reassure us, but we’re still worried. We think we have plenty of ways to protect the next landing party and even have some ideas on how to rid you of the lice, but we don’t want to try anything now. We want you in a fully functioning medical bay before taking the risk. Call us when you can.”
There were no messages from Rachel. That hurt, but she also felt relief at not having to talk to her daughter yet.
She stared at the camera. How could she even begin to explain what had happened? But she had to try. Since she couldn’t carry on a real conversation with a seventy-one-minute time lag, she just told her story in a long rambling monologue. She ended her message with a warning that they should land no one else until they could make sure their landing area was totally free of the lice and included her thoughts on killing them en masse.
Three hours later, Scooby hovered just out of arm’s reach. “You have two new messages from Rachel.”
“Could you play them for me? On the large wall screen. Please.”
Rachel’s face was blotchy and her eyes red, but she was more than just upset over her father. Umma knew her daughter and the set of her mouth said she was furious.
“I just found out that you’re working with these idiots up here to find a way to kill the lice. You’re a biologist, Mom! A xenobiologist! We came to this world to understand these creatures, not kill them. I know you’re upset about Dad. So am I. He was a part of me. My own flesh and—” her face screwed up and she looked away from the camera for a second. “And unlike you, I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him. So if I can look at these parasites as a possible sentient species, without planning revenge, then you should be able to as well.”
She laid both hands on the table and leaned into the camera.
“From your and Scooby’s accounts, there is plenty going on with the lice to make us go slow. They don’t have technology like us because they’ve never needed it, but they’re still showing signs of intelligence. They’re just primitive. As far as we know, we’re the advanced intelligence here, so the onus to show them we’re not just herd animals falls on us.”
Then her anger flared. She leaned even closer to the camera. “And who’s acting like an animal in this encounter? Lashing out because of anger and instinct, not reason? Do you think we can just come in here and kill them all? We can’t do this again, Mom! We can’t keep coming to new places and wiping the slate clean. You know Dad would never have done that.”
The message ended.
Umma jumped out of the chair, threw her water across the cabin and kicked the side of the comm console.
Scooby and Porky moved away.
“What the fuck does she know? She hasn’t seen these things! She doesn’t have them living inside her! She didn’t watch them kill Ian.”
“Perhaps that gives her a more unbiased perspective,” Scooby said softly from his position near the hatch.
“Unbiased? They killed her father. Well, she can be a self-righteous child if she wants, but I’m going to do everything I can to protect her from these little monsters. They killed my husband. They will not get my daughter too!”
“She has valid points. Maybe you should listen to her.”
“She’s twenty. And she always takes a position opposite mine. Always!”
Scooby drifted closer but still out of arm’s reach.
“So you think this is just youthful contrariness? She may only be twenty, but she is still a degreed biologist. Like it or not, she is your professional peer and deserves a fair hearing, for that reason if no other. She left a second message, twenty minutes after her first one. Do you want to hear it?”
Umma paced the small cabin, then eventually stopped before the console. “Play it.”
Tears trickled down Rachel’s face and the angry set to her mouth was gone. She paused to wipe her nose on her sleeve, like she had when she was six, and Umma felt her own heart melt. Rachel was suddenly a little girl again.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I’m just scared. I feel so alone here. No one will listen to me and no one is on my side. Please, just take a while and think about it. We’ve had a bad start, but we have time to do it right this time. I love you and I’m glad you’re okay.”
The message ended and Umma slid down the console to sit on the floor. She buried her face in her hands and tried to concentrate. It was hard when all she could think about was ridding herself of the nasty little bugs and never itching again. But her daughter needed her and she had to think it through.
She got up, climbed the central ladder and exited the Cochran through her uppermost hatch. The wind whipped her hair and felt cool and damp. Rain was on the way. This might someday be a nice home, but as she gazed out at the herd surrounding the ship, she didn’t see how. She was on a very small island in a vast living sea. But she would try it Rachel’s way. There would always be time for killing if it came to that.
Scooby hovered above and behind her. She realized for the first time that he had not left her side since Ian’s death.
“Scooby? I think our little jamming experiment proved that these things communicate by radio signals, at least on some level. I need your help. I want to implant something in myself, as well as in the frogvarks and herd animals, to intercept and record the signals these things use to communicate.”
“That should be easy enough. Sorting them into some coherent pattern will be the hard part.”
“Good. And please record the following to send to Rachel: ‘I’m sorry too. I am on your side and will help all I can. We’re going to try some things here, but please send me your thoughts about the lice. I love you.’”
Three days and nearly a thousand hours of AI research time later, Umma took a finger-sized herd beast from the box of models they had generated in the Cochran’s nano-constructor vat. She set it on the aluminum plate before a puddle of lice, then through the metal, sent the signal they thought the lice used for “herd beast.”
The lice examined the model and repeated the lone signal.
“Well, crap,” Umma said. “What does that mean?”
With MockDoc’s help, they had determined that the parasites didn’t exactly send radio signals through the air, but instead passed electrochemical pulses through long chains of their own bodies. There were always enough of them packed close together that the signals had a path. They used similar pulses to trigger firing in the nerve and pain centers of their hosts. The AIs had collected, sorted, and cataloged over four thousand signals, and complex but repeatable patterns had begun to emerge.
Not unlike human data transmission packets, the commands sent to control their host animals each had common headers, a one for humans, a different one for the frogvarks and another for the large herd animals. Each command seemed to have a signal combination. Some of the communication strings, or data packets, contained hundreds or even thousands of parts.
She replaced the model with one of a frogvark, sent the header signal for “frogvark.” The lice simply repeated the signal again.
“This is going nowhere fast.”
Scooby hovered nearby, watching and recording video to send back to Sinacola. “Have you noticed that the headers for their host animals, while different, still have a similar component?” he asked.
“Hmmm . . . that’s because to them, we’re all just mobile homes. Maybe it is their word for “host.” Let’s try something.”
Umma placed three models—a human, a frogvark, and a herd beast, in a group and sent just the common component of the header. The lice repeated the signal. Then she put the louse model in a location separate from the others and sent the same “host” header. The lice advanced, examined the model parasite, then formed back into a clump and to her surprise and shock, returned a signal that was different.
“Holy shit! Did you get that, Scooby?”
“Yes. It is a header we’ve seen before but didn’t understand.”
Umma picked up all of the models, then set down the frogvark and herd beast and sent the ‘host’ header. Next, she set the human model and the louse down together and sent the signal they now suspected meant ‘louse.’
There was no response. No repeated signal. Nothing.
“Well, I think we managed to confuse them. Maybe we should give up and try tomorrow. I’m getting really—”
Then the parasites sent a new signal.
“Bingo,” Scooby said. “It’s a combination of “louse” and “human” headers. A new category.”
Before Umma could even vocalize her amazement, her skin felt suddenly on fire. She gasped and started to wipe away the sudden flurry of lice, until she realized they were erupting out of her, from every pore and opening. She fought the urge to cough or sneeze and tried to remain very still. They left her by the millions, in wide, snaking lines that seemed to merge, then pass through the clump that still waited on the metal plate.
Almost simultaneously, the other AIs reported from all over the Cochran. The lice were leaving every part of the ship, even through the supposedly airtight seals of the body bags. Frogvarks arrived by the hundreds, and the parasites waited patiently to board and leave.
“Do you think they finally recognized us as peers and not just herd animals?” Umma said to no one in particular.
Scooby dropped down beside her face and said, “It appears so, but we still don’t know enough to be sure.”
“It’s a start. Maybe someday we’ll understand each other. I assume you’re recording all of this?”
“Of course,” Scooby said.
“Maybe Ian was right. Maybe we were born for this. Send the video to Rachel along with this message: You were right on every point. We do have time to do this the correct way. You’re a wonderful scientist. I wish your father could see this. He would’ve been so very proud.”