CHAPTER 13
SCOURGE
The flight to New Saint Louis took John and Kate nearly five hours. The tiny gasoline powered engine constantly strained to push the scooter through the heavy air at the slowest pace Kate had ever experienced in an aircraft. Because of the high density of the Aves atmosphere, the trip could also have been a turbulent one, Weltman told her. Thankfully, the weather was clear and calm, and the ride was surprisingly smooth.
Except when she hurriedly ate and drank her lunch, Kate held her COM unit in her hands the entire trip, recording her observations and using its digital zoom-focus to view things as through a telescope. She recorded in visual and infrared, both still and dynamic images. In addition to observations of the ground, she made several recordings of the grackle that shadowed them. The creature turned its head frequently to watch the airplane with big dark eyes, probably enjoying much better visual acuity than even the enhanced COM unit. By the time she returned to the Roc Bar, Kate would have several more cubes of data to examine.
This was data of a new type for her to study. From an altitude of several thousand meters she viewed from a radically different perspective the forests and the human cultivated areas of Aves. Viewed from Port City at ground level the forests that bordered the cultivated areas had loomed tall and of unknown depth. From the air she could see that the amount of land that remained forested was shockingly small, perhaps as little as ten percent. This had to be having an enormous impact on the ecosystem, she reasoned, even if many conservation measures were being practiced.
On the other hand, she saw thousands of birds in the fields, apparently participating in a symbiotic relationship with the humans. The birds ate the crawlers and a small portion of the crop itself, leaving most of it for the humans. The Corporation would doubtlessly argue that this was an idyllic merging of Aves and human interests, one that reduced the need for chemical and biological intervention, an approach that minimally impacted the local ecosphere. The birds that worked the fields certainly benefited from the arrangement; and for every human there were obviously many hundreds of birds.
The cultivated areas were each several square kilometers in size and rectangular shaped, intersected by roads that radiated out from the space port and scattered, smaller human towns. Very few dwellings were isolated from the towns.
The fields were various shades of green, depending on the particular crop, while the narrow strips of forest that bordered the cultivated areas were generally a rich, dark green. Compared with Mars and even old Earth, the sheer volume of living matter was staggering, even with most of the forest removed.
In a few of the fields there were scattered, barren brown patches of earth that she didn’t understand. The areas were irregular, but with sharply defined edges. They appeared to be completely devoid of vegetation. “What are those bare brown areas?” she asked Weltman, over the sound of rushing wind.
“Don’t know, exactly, but they spell trouble,” he shouted back, not bothering to use the COM link. “There should be nothing but crops in every field, but there are scattered conspicuous bare patches. Got to be the work of birds or bugs, I suppose. You’ll be seeing one close up soon, as that’s what the missing men were investigating when they disappeared. Here’s New Saint Louis coming up.”
Kate looked ahead and to the right and saw at the intersection of several roads a tiny settlement of perhaps three-dozen residences, a pair of huge garages and several giant grain silos. One of the silos was still under construction. Two small streams joined at the center of the settlement, perhaps serving as counterparts for the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers on Earth, otherwise she had no idea why the tiny town might have been named after the old Earth city. The little plane began a sharp decent. Glancing up Kate saw the ever-present grackle follow them down, gliding effortlessly without having to even flap its wings.
Only a few hundred meters above the ground, they flew past a small landing strip and continued to fly north of the town. “The spot they disappeared from should be just up ahead,” explained Weltman. “We’ll survey it from the air first; get your COM ready to record.”
A dozen or so vehicles were parked along the road ahead, several of them yellow security vehicles, and Kate could make out perhaps forty people scattered throughout the surrounding field, most of them arranged in irregular lines and walking about slowly, apparently looking for signs of the missing colonists and for clues. There were dozens of grackles in the area also, watching the humans.
What most captured Kate’s attention however, was the astonishingly bare brown area near the road. At first glance, it looked like bulldozers had torn up several acres of wheat field. In zoom mode however, she saw no machinery tracks, only soil that was shaped into huge rounded mounds and folds. She recorded the strange spectacle using several COM scan modes. For several minutes John than spiraled the scooter around and away from the bare spot as Kate continued to record images. Finally they flew back towards the landing strip. “Make a quick copy of your scans for the Corporation cops, Kate,” Weltman said, as they began their final decent. “And make an extra copy for us too, one that you hide really good someplace. Hide both the original and our copy right away.”
The landing was surprisingly smooth, and the tiny plane was soon taxing up to a large hangar at one end. Through a hangar door she saw huge complex machines without wings: farming equipment, she soon realized. The building wasn't an aircraft hangar, it was a garage for farm machinery. Some of the machines were partly disassembled, she noticed, they were probably being assembled and serviced in preparation for the coming harvest efforts. As a couple of Corporation farm workers helped Kate and John out of the scooter, a big scowling man stepped from the shadows of the open hangar and marched towards the new arrivals. “I‘m heading this investigation, Weltman,” he announced. “I don’t want you disturbing evidence.”
Weltman smiled. “Is that why you have every available colonist marching around through the fields, making footprints and so-forth? Oh, by the way Kate, this is Zeke Thomas, head of Corporation Security on Aves. Thomas, this is Dr. Kate Deborg, Directorate scientist. She’ll be helping me with my investigation.”
Kate was still adjusting to being safe on the ground. She resisted an urge to drop down on the ground and kiss it. Instead she reached out to shake the Corporation cop's hand, but was ignored.
Thomas merely glanced at Kate and laughed. “I figured as much, and it doesn’t change shit, Weltman. Stay the hell out of my way, both of you.”
“I figured we’d all cooperate, Zeke, you know, put aside our differences," Weltman explained. "The goal is to find Mark and Ken, right?”
“That’s high on my list. My list, not yours. Getting the hell home is high on yours.” He glanced at the COM that Kate held. “I’m betting you took some observations when you flew over the site, girl, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Kate. “And my name is Dr. Deborg,” sh
e added coldly.
“Your name is whatever the hell I want it to be. I want your COM memory cubes. Hand them over.”
Kate didn't move.
“In the spirit of cooperation we can make you copies,” said Weltman, winking at Kate without Thomas seeing.
“Fuck you Weltman; I want the originals and I want them right now.”
“Then we’ll make copies for ourselves,” said Weltman, protesting angrily.
“I said now.” He held out his hand to Kate.
Kate looked at Weltman, who nodded grimly. She opened the COM unit, pulled out the cube, and dropped the copy into Thomas’s big hand. “For the record,” she said coldly, “I’ll be filing an official Directorate protest against your company, Mr. Thomas, for impeding an official Directorate investigation and impounding Directorate equipment. You’re damn well personally going to be hauled to Earth and in front of a Space Directorate Board of Inquiry, I personally guarantee it.”
Thomas smirked, but he was struck speechless for several seconds, and Kate thought that his sun darkened face paled just a little. “Fuck the Directorate,” he said finally, spun on his heal, and marched away.
“I’ll quote that in my report, ass-hole,” declared Kate to his receding back, “and you can feel free to quote me.”
John Weltman gave Kate a big smile. “Well played, Kate. He drew enough blood to satisfy his ego but I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble from him for now. Are you really going to file some kind of official charges?”
“No. Aves is under Corporation jurisdiction. But it never hurts to try to bluff a moron like him. What did he want our scans for anyway? I assume the Corporation has satellite scans of better resolution than we could possibly collect.”
“No doubt they do. Zeke just wants to impede our investigation and to bug me. Or to put it in your terms, he’s an ass-hole and likes showing it. He was probably never schooled beyond kindergarten, but he’s Helmins’ son-in-law and the old man trusts him.” He motioned Kate to follow him into the deserted hangar. The people normally working in the hanger were probably out searching for the missing farmers, she realized. The hangar wasn't air conditioned, but it was still a tremendous relief simply to be out of the heat of the twin suns. John unfolded a meter-square portable view screen that he pulled from his pack and propped it up against a wall. “Did you do an infrared scan of the brown zone?”
“Sure.” Kate linked her COM into the screen and within a few seconds they were staring at an infrared image of the mysterious barren area outside of New Saint Louis.
Weltman whistled. “Look at that temperature gradient!”
“Makes sense,” said Kate. “Without plants to convert energy into plant biomass and evaporate water, the dark, bare soil is absorbing most of the radiation from the suns. The several degree temperature difference makes sense. The wheat-covered areas are somewhat cooler, while the soil temperature in the surrounding woods is even lower. The entire blown patch is downright hot. Oops. Except for this part of it.” She pointed an area along one edge. “That’s actually even cooler than the wheat covered area. Why would that be?”
“Let’s get out of these glide suits and go see.”
In minutes they had peeled off the glide suits and stored them in the scooter. John handed Kate a wide-brimmed visor and hooded poncho made of extraordinarily light material with a reflective metallic sheen to it. Kate had seen some of the other Aves people wearing them. “This is standard gear for field hands,” he explained. “It will reflect away most of the heat and light from the suns. Take this too.” He handed her a short-barreled rifle, tucked away in a fabric holster that was obviously to be worn around the waist. “Standard gear for us old timers that remember the bird wars.” He dressed himself similarly, except that he wore two guns, a thick, short-barreled scattergun and a rifle. With backpacks full of food, ammunition, water, and other gear, they left the scooter and walked the hundred meters from the hangar into town.
A multi-wheeled yellow Corporation security vehicle was waiting for them. Out of it climbed a tall, thin, wiry, black skinned individual with a wide, teeth-filled smile. “Real good to see you, John,” he said warmly, as he shook Weltman’s hand vigorously before turning to Kate. “And this has got to be the infamous Dr Deborg. Damn! I heard she was a real looker and I heard right!” Still grinning, he shook her hand also.
Weltman laughed. “Forget it Frank, she’s smart too. Kate, this toad is Lieutenant Frank Jackson, the REAL head of Aves Corporation Security as far as doing anything useful goes, and a sucker for any female between eighteen and eighty.”
“Heck no, I ain’t that particular! Hey, it’s a new planet and we all got to do our best to populate it,” Jackson explained, but then his smile disappeared. “On the other hand, somebody or something wants to depopulate it, that’s for damn certain.” He motioned them towards the vehicle. “Hop in and I’ll take you guys the scene of the crime while I fill you in.”
“Zeke has gone back to Port?” asked Weltman.
“Yeah, thank goodness. He just came out to see things for himself, get in our way, and hassle you a bit. He's headed back to Port where he'll doubtless set his lazy ass behind his fancy desk. You know Zeke. Now that he’s gone we can all get back to actual work.”
“Tell us what happened.”
“Well, the townies say that they first noticed a disturbed area of wheat three days ago. The men started to stand guard out in the field. Mark and Ken had the morning shift today. When the afternoon shift showed up Mark and Ken where nowhere to be found, but the area of disturbed gound got bigger..”
“Did they try tracking footprints and so-forth before Zeke had you guys wondering all around the place?”
“First thing. Joe Felden followed their trail via IR imaging and DNA sniffer. The trail ended abruptly on the far edge of the disturbed area. They disappeared without a trace, just like the others.
“In the cooler area,” interjected Kate.
“Right. Pretty sharp! You guys COMed that from the plane, right? Good work, but you’re crazy as hell to fly. I never did trust these damn birds.” Without looking, he pointed out of the car window at two grackles that were flying alongside.
“One followed us in from Port, Frank," John noted. "The other one must be yours. You get a promotion or something?”
Frank laughed. “Nope. I’m still just a lieutenant, but they’ve been following me for a couple weeks now. They must be up to something, like you and Captain Jack say, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
“What caused the disturbed ground?” asked Kate. “Any ideas?”
“Lots of ideas, none of them worth shit,” replied Frank. “What do you think, John?”
“I’m not sure anymore. We noticed some disturbances in the previous two years, but we were plowing and bulldozing most of the fields so much we didn’t think it had anything to do with the disappearances. Now with the crops planted, the disturbed areas are obvious for the first time. My theory had always been birds rooting around, taking advantage of our digging. That didn’t ever quite fit, since there doesn’t ever seem to be bird sign, but what else could it possibly be?”
“Birds are still as good a theory as any,” said Frank. “The other theory is that it’s made by some kind of ground-borrowing insects or something. But wait until you get a closer look; it would have to be some damn big bugs.”
They parked among the other vehicles at the site and got out, and the new arrivals got their first close look at the disturbed area. Over an area of at least ten acres, what was once a nearly flat wheat field now looked like a construction site gone haywire, with mounds several meters across and high, and troughs of soil several meters wide and deep and dozens of meters long. Several grackles hopped among the mounds and troughs, apparently also studying them.
“Damn!” exclaimed Kate.
“That’s just what the farmers said, I imagine,” said Frank. “This is only a fraction of a percent of the crops; so far it’s n
o big deal in that regard, but what if it keeps spreading?”
John whistled and was clearly shocked. “This disturbance is much more radical than anything last year, or we would have noticed it. Look at the size of those mounds! It would take heavy earth-moving equipment hours to do all that; I don’t see how even flocks of birds could possibly do it. Look, the mounds dwarf those grackles. There are much bigger birds of course, sea birds and even storks, in other parts of Aves, but we’d see them if they were here. Damn it, I just can't see how birds could have done this!”
“From the scooter we saw several other areas like this on the way here,” said Kate.
“Right,” nodded Frank. “They started appearing late last week, but the size of the mounds has been increasing every day, and the disturbed areas double daily in size. Maybe we had some of these last year, but the disturbances couldn’t have been this bad, or like you say, we would have noticed. And of course there was only that one case that we know of two years ago, and the whole area was being bulldozed to make flat fields at that point.” He glanced over to Weltman. “Sorry John.”
Kate realized that Frank had to be referring to the disappearance of Weltman’s wife.
The sheriff took a deep breath, and then continued. “So then, significant soil disturbance could have occurred in the case of every unexplained human disappearance. There has to be a connection.” Out of habit, he scanned the sky. His hand suddenly went to his holstered shotgun. “Damn! Will you look at all the blackbirds!”
They all followed his gaze. Hundreds of grackles were circling lazily only a hundred meters above the cleared area.
“I don’t like it,” said John. “What are they doing here? Maybe it’s them. Maybe they’re getting ready to attack us!”
Frank shrugged. “Take it easy, John; they haven’t ever attacked people, at least as far as we know.”
John said nothing, but he kept one hand on his holstered shotgun and frequently glanced up at the circling birds.
They had walked right to the edge of the devastated area. Kate kicked a massive rounded mound of soil with her boot to no effect. The soil wasn’t loose, it was solidly formed as though by a giant mold. “Are the mounds always formed like this?” she asked. "The mounds look like they've been formed by compressing soil into huge round molds of different sizes. Some molds were several meters across, some were less than a half of a meter across." She took off her backpack and pulled out a ceramic tube, scraped some of the compacted soil into it.
“Hard to say,” said Weltman. "There may have been patterns in the soil similar to this last year, but they couldn't have been anywhere near this huge.”
Kate placed the soil filled tube into a slot on her COM unit and made some keyset entries.
“You know,” said Frank, “it looks like the mounds are the remains of compressed tubes of dirt, but the dirt looks changed to me.” He climbed up the nearest mound and kicked at it hard with his foot. A small piece broke off and crumbled when it landed at the base of the mound. “It don’t look as rich and black as where it ain’t been disturbed. It looks sort of different, somehow. Too brown, not as black as regular soil. It’s as if much of the living stuff is gone.” Kate took soil samples from what Frank had kicked from the mound along with control samples from outside the mounded area, before being joined by John and Frank.
"My COM measures an 80% decrease in organic material for the mound samples," she announced. "What the hell? The remaining organic material is mostly dead. Live organics have been extracted and replaced by simpler compounds. It's like the soil has been processed. Digested."
"Shit!" exclaimed Frank.
"Exactly," said Kate. "Huge tubes of it."
The trio suddenly felt rather than heard a trembling in the Earth, like a sound too deep to hear. “What the hell was that?” asked John, as he pulled his short shotgun out. Overhead, hundreds of gathering grackles started screaming. "Earthquake?"
Somewhere nearby a woman screamed. Kate could see a dozen search party members standing a hundred meters away in a field on the other side of the disturbed area, shouting and looking around. Several of them had drawn their guns, but like Weltman, had no idea where to point them. Suddenly, as she watched, the ground heaved up beneath the group’s feet, and most of them fell and dropped out of sight in the waist-tall wheat, as a bus-sized, dark mass pushed up from the ground in their midst. Some of the human screams were cut short.
Kate tried to make sense of what she was seeing. It rose two, ten, and finally twenty meters above the torn ground, a massive black/brown cylindrical unknown something, appearing for a few seconds like a shiny, smooth-barked tree trunk three meters in diameter, though it was rounded at the protruding end. An indeterminate number of barrel thick, short, stubby protrusions were visible on it thing also. Suddenly the entire length of the thing curved down sharply, and plunged down towards the field like a sounding whale, taking two more colonists with it. They were all thrown to their knees onto the bare brown earth when the creature rammed its front-end back into the ground with a sound like thunder that mixed with the sound of gunfire and screaming people and birds. Meanwhile more of it continued to emerge from the ground.
The damn thing was alive, Kate realized, it was a monstrous snake or worm! Standing next to her, Weltman drew the rifle from its holster and shot at the monster, while Frank shouted orders into his COM unit.
Had any of the far search party escaped? Kate looked but couldn’t tell. A huge loop of the thing was still emerging steadily, exposing itself, and slipping back into the ground just as quickly. Finally the blunt tail-end of the creature slid up and then disappeared beneath the surface, trailing a rounded tube of soil behind it. It had to have been fifty meters long, at least! Other worm-creatures were emerging around the first one, most of them smaller, but a few monstrously larger. Kate looked around and saw that in nearly all directions big worms were emerging out of the fields, dozens and then hundreds of them!
Kate’s concern for other searchers was soon forgotten as the earth under Frank, John, and herself began to contort wildly, pushed and pulled by unimaginable forces below them. Kate saw a three-meter diameter circle of wheat a few steps behind her suddenly sink down and disappear into the gaping mouth of an emerging, truck-sized head that had come up almost underneath them. The entire front end of the thing was an open mouth! John and Frank blazed away at this closest monster worm with their guns, but the head rose steadily until it was fifteen meters above them, where it was attacked by a half-dozen screaming grackles.
Appearing not to even notice humans, bullets or birds, the huge beast plunged down into the earth, meter after impossible meter of it burrowing downward again with relentless power. Smaller worms were dragging themselves along the surface, gulping down wheat and battling birds that attacked them furiously from above with beak and claw.
Grackles, starlings, cowbirds, sparrows, and a sprinkling of other small birds seemed driven mad at the sight of the worms; they attacked them with abandon from the air and on the ground. The smaller worms, some less than human in size, were torn apart by the birds, but the larger creatures struck back and sucked bird after screaming bird into cavernous worm mouths. The entire front end of each worm was a mouth, fringed and circled within by what appeared to be row upon row of fist-sized protuberances that must have served as teeth.
Kate suddenly realized that she had seen these worms before, or at least their smaller cousins. It was the worm-like thing she had ran her gene match on! These were native Aves creatures, not genetically altered imports from Earth!
Nearby worms lifted their heads and seemed to look around, though no eyes or other sensing organs were evident. Several moved towards the three humans in mass. He and Frank stood to either side of Kate, pumping lead into the advancing worms. “Shoot the smaller ones,” she heard John shout. "Dodge the big ones; it's the only thing we can do!"
They came with mouths open, crawling on stubby legs and slithering on slimy bodies. Bull
et after bullet passed right through them, producing oozing holes without much immediate effect, but gradually the creatures slowed down and collapsed, dying. However, it took too many gunshots to stop even the smallest worms. There were far too many of them to shoot, Kate realized, and the birds weren’t attacking the worms that were attacking her and her two companions.
“Use your gun,” John admonished Kate.
Before now she had been ‘shooting’ the worms with only her COM unit, and had not even touched her holstered scattergun. Now she quickly pulled it out and made up for lost time. Two nearby grackles attacking small worms near her retreated away when she drew out her gun, she noticed. The human trio killed several more of the smaller worms, blasting terrible bloody chunks from their grotesque, squirming bodies, but other, bigger worms kept coming, and they soon run out of ammunition. Kate knew that they had to try something else. “Put the guns down on the ground and back away from them quietly,” she instructed.
John and Frank and looked at Kate, at their useless empty guns, then shrugged and complied. Kate especially made a big show of placing her gun on the ground as the trio backed further into the brown zone, away from the surging worms.
The response came in a matter of seconds. As more worms squirmed towards them, dozens of blackbirds dropped out of the sky, bills spearing and tearing at the monsters. The human trio moved further away from the field and into the brown zone, helping each other over giant brown mounds of soil, until deep in the mounds they found themselves to be away from the fighting and no longer pursued.
From a vantage point atop a large mound Kate took out her COM again and slowly swept it around, recording the worm/bird battle that still raged. Hundreds more birds arrived; dozens more worms erupted from the earth. Kate heard no more gunshots, but guns were mostly irrelevant anyway. Birds fought and died, though many more carried away huge chunks of worm flesh. Worms ate both birds and the dead of their own kind, sucking them into their huge cylindrical bodies.
The worms focused on the edges of the brown area, enlarging it, while generally avoiding revisiting areas they had previously covered. That made sense to Kate. They had no interest in areas they had already eaten.
After only a few more terrible minutes, the fighting stopped. A scattering of surviving birds remained flying above, but the worms were gone. The humans approached the newly devastated area cautiously, acutely aware that they were completely unarmed. They were shocked by what they discovered. The brown area had been expanded by dozens of acres. What had been wheat field only minutes earlier was a maze of monstrous rounded brown mounds of worm-digested soil.
Surprisingly, despite the carnage there were no dead or wounded birds or humans in sight; evidently the worms had consumed them. There were no dead worms in sight either; what the worms didn’t take the birds did; hundreds of blackbirds and songbirds were still flying away from the scene carrying big chunks of worm-flesh. Most evidence quickly disappeared.
“That was quick thinking back there, Doc,” said Frank. “Our guns were killing a few of the damn things, but keeping away the birds. If we hadn’t run out of ammo and put down our guns to let the birds attack, we would have been over-run by those monsters.” He shook his head sadly. “I guess now we know for sure what’s been carrying our folks off. Hell, they must have got a couple dozen more people this time.” He was standing atop a dirt mound, scanning the area. There were only a few survivors to be seen, most searchers had fallen victim to the sudden worm attack.
“I’ve seen those damn things lots of times before, up to a meter or two long,” added a very shaken up John Weltman. He was sitting atop another mound, staring blankly at the newly decimated field. “To me it was just another creepy Aves thing.”
“I gene sampled one of them that was only a couple of centimeters long,” said Kate. “Unlike the birds and most of the plants I sampled, it’s not of terrestrial origin.”
“I don’t give a damn where they’re from,” said John angrily, “and neither did Mary.”
Mary. His wife; his lost love. Kate didn’t know what to say.
Weltman slid off the mound and began pacing in circles. “It was the God damn worms, all the time! Why didn’t I realize what it was? I could have warned her! I could have stopped her!”
“And keep her from her work?” Kate countered. “Based on what? That early on you couldn’t have known it was the worms, and even if you suspected, you couldn’t have had proof. And you couldn’t have stopped her; she wouldn’t let you.”
Weltman looked at her as if he just noticed she was there. “Kate, what are you talking about? You didn’t even know her!”
“No, but I know you, John Weltman. If you married her she must have had enough going for her to not be stopped by anything you could say about it. I mean, you couldn’t have stopped me, either, if I wanted to do my work.”
Weltman was speechless, and his shoulders slumped as the rage seemed to slowly drain from him.
“Well? Am I right?” she asked quietly.
“Maybe. Maybe you are.”
“So OK,” said Frank, “now that we do know about them, how the hell are we going to stop them?”
“First things first,” replied Weltman. “Let’s search for survivors and get them back to town before those things attack again.”
After twenty minutes of frantic searching it appeared that all survivors that would be found quickly had been found. People had either escaped the attack with only minor injuries or were gone completely. Shocked survivors of the small community helped Weltman compile a list of names of the missing. Twenty-five people were unaccounted for. Kate didn’t recognize any of the names, but it was obvious that Weltman and Jackson knew several of them. The stunned survivors were in mourning.
“Frank, why don’t you get a planet-wide warning out, and Kate and I will go get the plane and scan from the air,” announced Weltman. “There could still be injured people that need help hidden in the mounds or in the crops. Frank, if you can stay here in case we spot someone, we’ll vector you in to recover them.”
Frank Jackson nodded in agreement as John and Kate walked with him back to the Corporation car. When they got to the vehicles they were in for another shock. Among worm mounds, they found their yellow Corporation car and several others smashed and overturned.
“At least they don’t eat cars, just bang them up some,” said John.
“Not yet, anyway,” said Kate. “The new mounds are bigger than ever, suggesting ever bigger worms. If they get even bigger, who knows what they might munch on?”
They hitched a ride to town with a badly shaken farmer whose vehicle had weathered the attack. “They got my son,” he told them, in tears. “Swallowed him up right next to me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.” Kate was glad when they reached the airfield and she had something to do besides listen to the grief-stricken farmer and something to think about besides the monster worms and the carnage that she had just witnessed.
Tiny met them at the hangar. He must have driven the tram like a madman to get there so quickly. The big deputy helped his sheriff refuel the plane as they talked. “I got the giant worm story by COM, Boss. Helmins is talking about moving up the harvest.”
Weltman’s jaw dropped. “He’s what?”
“Most crops can be chemically ripened in days. He figures to finish the whole harvest within a week or two, before worms take it all. The crop will be reduced by at least another ten percent, and lose its organic rating, but most of it will be saved.”
“He wants to put farmers with harvesting equipment in the fields with those monsters?”
“Nights and early mornings, with Corporation security forces guarding them. Word is, the worms only attack in the heat of late morning or afternoon.”
Weltman shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. What do you think, Kate?”
Kate had loaded a fresh data cube into her COM and was busily pulling her flight suit on. ”Much too soon to say, John. We only discovered these creat
ures today.”
Weltman nodded as he started putting his own flight suit on. “I agree. It’s too big a risk. We need to find out more about the worms first, but I don’t see how folks would go for this plan anyway. Don’t they know what happened out here? How would security forces make a difference? Our weapons were almost useless. We lost 25 people today, dead and gone, in addition to the first two. Eaten in front of our eyes in a matter of minutes, damn it! Shit, Joe Barns was one of them, Tiny, Joe Barns! And Sylvia Fremont and her son Joey! People that have lived here for years!”
Tiny’s jaw dropped. “We lost 25 more people? The broadcast report said that several people were injured, and that Corporation security forces quickly drove the worms away.”
Weltman climbed aboard the plane and motioned Kate to do the same. “That’s grade-A Corporation bull-shit, Tiny. More likely the worms had enough to eat for now and dove back under the surface to digest their victims in peace. The birds were much more effective against the worms than guns but even they had no chance against the biggest monsters.
“Kate and I will deal with getting out the true story when we get back to Space Port City, Tiny. We have a search for survivors to complete before dark first. Tomorrow we’ll fly south and have it out with the Corporation. In the meantime, I want you to help Frank keep all civilians away from the scene and from other fields for as long as you can.”
“Sure thing Boss. Hey, let me give you a hand with that.” The big man easily pushed the airplane out of the hangar, and pointed its nose into the wind. The scooter motor started easily for Weltman, and after a few seconds of warm-up he and Kate were soon airborne once again. Kate was still frightened of heights, but she actually felt safer in this instance to be airborne and out of reach of any monster worms.
As they soared into the air Kate took note that she and John were still being shadowed by a grackle, despite the disturbing worm attack. However watching for worms took precedence over everything else for most of the blackbirds; dozens of them still circled lazily above the brown area, apparently waiting for the leviathans to return. Why? Many birds had lost their lives in the counterattack. Were they defending the humans, or the crops, or was there some other motive behind their aggressive anti-worm behavior? Kate had no idea.
From above, the increased size of the attacked area was shockingly apparent. The brown area of worm-formed, mounded soil had at least doubled, and the newly tilled sections registered slightly cooler than the sun baked surroundings, due to the soil mixing effect so recently accomplished by the worms. After a few hours of sunshine however, Kate realized that disturbed areas would be sunbaked and hotter than ever, possibly stimulating more worm growth, emergence, and attacks.
As John skillfully circled, Kate swept the tilled area and the surrounding fields carefully, looking for human-produced infrared heat signatures. She found none, except for Frank and two of his men. As they had surmised from the ground, people had either escaped or were gone completely, consumed by the ravenous leviathans of the deep Aves soil. Grimly, Weltman COMed Frank that there was nobody left to rescue and turned the small craft towards Space Port City.
The flight to that point had been smooth, but soon the wind, pushed by darkening clouds that were sweeping in from the southwest, began to build. The highflying craft gradually lost groundspeed and began to buck and bounce. “Hell, Kate, I’m sorry,” shouted Weltman. “I haven’t paid enough attention to the weather, and now we’re in for it bad.”
Directly ahead of them a titanic black wall of clouds towered, lightning streaks dancing across its surface. Deep thunder shook the plane. Kate realized that she would finally witness her first summer rainstorm on Aves, possibly from inside the storm itself. Though still several kilometers away, it was bearing down on them with incredible speed.
Weltman turned the plane, intending to return to New Saint Louis. The wind both aided and opposed this endeavor, for although it enhanced their eastward progress it also tended to blow them off course and too far towards the north. Their blackbird escort still followed them, but needed to flap its wings strongly to do so.
The plane increasingly tossed and twisted, buffeted by ever more erratic winds; several times Kate would have been thrown from the plane if not for the seatbelt. A rash of huge amorphous droplets of water suddenly struck, pushing down on the craft and reminding Kate that raindrop size was huge on Aves, at least an ounce a drop. Lightning crashed to the right of them, a deafening tower of white flame unlike anything she had ever seen.
The storms of Aves’ thick atmosphere dwarfed those of Earth, Kate soon realized. This storm was immeasurably greater than even the towering dust storms she had experienced on Mars. Terrified, she tightly gripped the plane’s frame with both hands, though the tiny, flimsy aircraft seemed to offer little protection from the titanic power of the storm.
“We need to land now!” shouted Weltman. His words whipped past her, barely audible above the noise of thunder, wind, rain, and the shuddering scooter. The plane dropped ground-ward, but dimly through the falling sheets of water Kate saw that they had already been swept past the open fields and were now flying perilously close to forest treetops that whipped about wildly in the wind. “Hell,” yelled Weltman as he pulled back on the controls at full throttle. The airplane seemed to hardly notice his efforts; it still languished awkwardly among huge thrashing treetops which threatened to swat the tiny craft as if it were a bothersome buzzing insect.
As he dodged around the animated crowns of huge trees, the aircraft slowly gained in altitude, though intermittent sheets of water threatened to batter it down again.
They slowly made headway, and the rain and turbulence gradually diminished as they climbed again above the trees and away from the storm. Weltman had changed strategy, Kate realized. They couldn’t possibly land, not in this forest and this wind; they had no choice but to remain airborne, so he had turned the airplane to now travel with the wind and was using the fore-winds of the storm itself to race ahead of it. As they worked their way out of the pounding rain and regained more altitude, their ground speed was tripled by the fierce tailwind; they were soon flying north at a high rate of speed above a great virgin forest: an unknown wilderness far from human civilization. The flash of lightning and terrifying crash of thunder receded, but still chased behind them.
Things could be worse, Kate reasoned. They were still alive.
A quarter of an hour later, things did get worse. When a dark shadow glanced across the scooter, Kate looked up and saw a dozen blackbirds, flying high above them. The grackle that still followed the scooter broke away and rose towards them.
Kate had assumed that the high flying blackbirds were also grackles, but when their grackle reached them she realized that these birds were much larger. The wingspan of each of them was twice that of the grackle. Crows?
“Caw, caw, caw,” they cried, confirming their identity, as they dove towards the plane.
****