They never expected this conversion to be carried out in one clean switch. Various avenues would be explored over generations. Mistakes abandoned. Successes built upon. But slowly and surely the divergence from terrestrial humanity would grow until the final generation could walk naked under an alien sun and breathe the air without technological support.
Z-B's briefing had explained all this to the platoons. The emphasis had been on cellular adaptation, giving the impression of ordinary-looking people with slightly different lungs. It had never mentioned just how great the physiological changes would be.
Looking at the inhabitants of Roseport, Lawrence knew the briefing had barely touched the history of Santa Chico. Whatever had happened here since settlement began, it wasn't going to act in the platoon's favor.
In the beginning, Santa Chico had been the one exception to interstellar trade being a nonprofit activity. Among other things, the planet churned out a panoply of high-grade vaccines, biologicals, antivirals, vector treatments and biotronics, products that were unique, cutting-edge, and hard to duplicate. With an entire planetary ecology of potent vegetation and aquatic plants as raw materials, every new batch was an improvement on the last: more sophisticated, more effective. New settlers would travel outbound from Earth, and the completed biologicals would return, paying for starship maintenance and any technological and industrial equipment the inhabitants had requested. But over the last few years the starships had been returning with less and less cargo. As fewer settlers were heading out, the Earth-based portion of the Santa Chico development corporation became heavily debt-laden. Zantiu-Braun had performed a leveraged buyout and sent its Third Fleet to realize all those highly profitable biological assets.
The platoons lining the shore were ordered to advance up into Roseport. Their audience moved aside, filling the air with a loud, high-pitched cluttering sound, as if a whole jungle full of chimpanzees were screaming at once. Later, the AS up in the starship would decipher the cluttering as a very-high-speed hybrid of Spanish and Valley English. Captains ordered snatch squads forward to fix collateral necklaces. Skin amplifiers boomed out instructions, telling the new-natives not to resist, that they were being held responsible for...
The fight started immediately. New-natives swarmed down the rocky slope into the line of Skins. They didn't seem to have any weapons, but they were strong and extremely fast, easily a physical match for Skin. There were so many of them, and the platoons were so closely bunched still, that using darts and other nonlethal weapons was difficult What appeared to be a hairless ape leaped on Lawrence, carrying him to the ground. Huge clawed hands were either trying to remove his Skin helmet, or more likely just rip his entire head off. Lawrence gripped the thing's wrists and tried to prize them off. His Skin wasn't strong enough. Sheer surprise made him freeze for a second. Nothing in training had dealt with a situation like this. Skin always gave squaddies the advantage.
He pushed down with his right leg, shifting the pair of them over. Then he punched the thing on its sternum. It grunted in pain but kept twisting its claws round Lawrence's neck. Lawrence punched it again, feeling the tough amber hide give fractionally. After a few more seconds of futile wrestling, Lawrence ordered the Skin to fire its electrical pulse. The ape-thing screamed, its limbs locked as the charge ripped through it, then resumed its attempted decapitation. Something like a baby elephant joined in, kicking Lawrence in the ribs. He was left with no choice. His Skin's nine-millimeter pistol deployed through the carapace, and he shot the ape-thing at point-blank range. The first bullet simply enraged it further. Lawrence had to pump half a dozen shots into the demented creature before it finally lay motionless on the tigergrass. Vivid scarlet blood spilled out from the bullet holes in its torso and neck.
Lawrence staggered away from the thing, his ribs aching from the kicking administered by the baby elephant. He ignored that. Nausea and giddiness threatened to knock his legs from under him. He'd never killed anyone before. Not another human. And that's what this was, however distorted. Those clever Skin weapons had always absolved him, turned it into a nonissue.
Now the air around him crackled with weapons being discharged. The agonized screams of mortally injured new-natives cut through it all. Something approximating a Neanderthal ran straight into Lawrence, sending both of them tumbling to the ground. Lawrence brought his pistol arm around automatically. Targeting graphics centered on the prehistoric throwback's head. It had a tall, scalloped ridge running from the top of its nose over the crown of its skull, with a lacework of blue veins throbbing prominently. Very Homo sapiens eyes stared wildly at him, allowing him to read the new-native's fright and anger.
"Fuck off," Lawrence bellowed. He jerked the pistol nozzle up and fired three shots into the air. The new-native rolled aside and scrambled to its feet, sprinting away. Lawrence slowly clambered up as his Skin's peristaltic muscles pushed fresh ammunition along a feed tube into the pistol's magazine.
There was movement on every side of him, with a hundred voices shouting into his communication link. It took Lawrence a long moment to realize what was happening. The fight was breaking up. New-natives were fleeing back up the slope into the streets and buildings of Roseport, running, galloping, limping, even hopping. Dozens of bodies lay behind them, draped over the pale rocks; some were drifting through the shallows, blood spreading out of their wounds to stain the water a dense crimson. Hundreds of little ripples were expanding as aquatic creatures began to feed on the unexpected bounty. It was carnage on a scale Lawrence had never envisaged. Nor was it exclusively new-natives sprawled on the ground. Several Skins were tangled among them, their carapaces pulped and buckled, oozing gore.
Shots were still being fired into the backs of the retreating new-natives. Sergeants and captains yelled to cease fire.
"Sweet Fate," Lawrence whispered. Skins were on their knees around him, helmet valves open, allowing them to vomit. Lawrence's Skin AS reported it was infusing a cocktail of narcotics to help him cope with the shock its medical monitors had revealed. He felt light-headed, as if everything he'd just witnessed were part of some terrible i-drama. He didn't want to move, to take part, help his injured comrades. Just wanted someone to switch the whole image off and wipe the memory clean.
"Hey, look," Nic shouted. "Look up there. Jesus God, what is the deal here?"
Lawrence pushed his sensor focus into the cloudless sky above. He almost laughed; the numbing drugs made it seem funny. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse ... The cargo pods were hitting the lower atmosphere, their madcap descent slowing to subsonic speed. White-and-yellow parachutes bloomed high overhead, lowering them gently. A flock of windshrikes glided among them with fast grace. Massive crocodile-contoured jaws snapped and champed at the domes of fabric. Teeth the size of human hands tore easily through the nylon. With their chute panels ripped apart the pods began to plummet downward. They hit the ground at terminal velocity and burst apart in silent explosions of shattered crates and mangled equipment.
After the injured Skins had been treated as best their limited medical supplies would allow them, the erstwhile governor of Roseport gathered his officers for an emergency conference. They had been down for ninety minutes and hadn't even entered the city yet, let alone established collateral. Nearly a third of their equipment pods had been wrecked. The local inhabitants were nothing like they'd been led to expect. And the starship captains were reporting continued attempts to sabotage and attack the big vessels in orbit: subversive software was contaminating every datalink, while kinetic spears in retrograde orbits were probing their physical defenses. The admiral's orders were to establish a dominant presence among the new-natives, then draw up an inventory of possible assets.
Roseport's governor went along with that, but put securing the local spaceport at the top of his priority list. Lawrence was in the company assigned to retrieve the pods that had survived. He just counted himself lucky 435NK9 wasn't one of the platoons ordered into Roseport itself. As he and
the others tramped through the clinging tigergrass, they heard a near-constant barrage of small-arms fire and grenade explosions. They could see very little movement amid the peaceful sprawl of squat white towers that formed the majority of the little city's buildings. But the communications link gave them a continuing story of ambushes and booby traps.
Even out on the lush plain skirting the city they weren't immune. Infrared sensors were all but useless in the rolling expanse of tall tigergrass. New-natives lay in wait, hunched down among the roots, bulky creatures capable of damaging Skin carapaces with a couple of swift blows and often making a clean escape after they'd battered a squaddie to the ground. Communications became difficult as interference and jamming increased throughout the day. Somebody here was operating sophisticated electronics.
By nightfall the company had gathered enough equipment to set up a camp with a heavily guarded perimeter. Jeeps and trucks transported the whole lot over to the spaceport, a single runway that had been set out to the north of town. With their escape route secure and a large-caliber arsenal at hand, the squaddies relaxed slightly.
Lights shone in the city that night, lemon-yellow windows radiant against the deep night. Strange shadows moved along the walls in jerky motions. Sounds echoed through the still air, helping to fuel the invaders' imagination, making them wonder what the new-natives were busy building.
On the second day, the governor divided up his forces. Several platoons would attempt to establish a foothold in the city again, while other companies were dispatched to known industrial sites. Satellite observation had revealed the factory structures were still intact, though most were apparently deserted. Best of all, a squadron of twelve TVL88 tactical support helicopters had survived, and the engineers had spent the night assembling them. The companies could call on a full aerial assault if they got into any trouble. When Lawrence's company drove out that morning, the pilots were taking odds on how many windshrikes they were going to bag apiece.
Lawrence called in the empty factory offices to Ntoko, and they turned around to walk back to the company's vehicles. After the first few reports, Captain Lyaute had decided the factory was never going to work again. He was recalling all the scouting parties.
"I don't get it," Kibbo said. "Why did they let this place fall apart in the first place?"
"Fate knows," Lawrence said. "But at least we know why they stopped exporting all that fancy expensive biological junk. They just don't produce it anymore."
"That's not a reason, Corp," Jones said. "Why did they abandon factories like this? We know they worked better than anything on Earth."
"They're animals, man, that's why," Kibbo said. "What are you, blind? Didn't you guys see those things that attacked us yesterday? They ain't human anymore; they're freaks. This is a fucking great planet full of freaks. No animal can run a factory. And they don't need human medicines anymore."
"They're not animals," Lawrence said. "They're people; they just look different, that's all."
"No way, man, they're filthy animals. They don't even talk, all they do is scream all funny. They attacked us for no reason."
"It was territorial," Amersy said.
"What?"
"Territorial; you said they were animals."
"The corp said they weren't."
"In which case we're in deep shit," Jones said. "If they fight like that and they're smart with it there's no telling what they'll throw at us next."
"You think I don't know that?" Amersy grumbled.
"So why did they dump this place?" Kibbo said.
"Who knows?" Amersy said. "They still use machinery. You saw the lights in Roseport last night. Our communications links are being screwed by their jamming. And the spaceport runway was intact. One of the engineers I talked to this morning said the spaceplanes they found in the hangar were still flightworthy. Somebody's been maintaining them."
"So there's some real people left? So what? That doesn't mean there's anything here for us."
Lawrence agreed with Kibbo, though not for the same reasons. He didn't think the new-natives were animals. They might not have quite the same behavior pattern as humans, but they were certainly sentient. Exactly where that put them on the evolutionary scale he wasn't sure.
Captain Lyaute got everybody into the vehicles and ordered them back to Roseport's spaceport. When he called in their return to the governor, he was informed that all the similar exploratory missions had found the same thing. The cities were occupied by extremely hostile new-natives, while the factories were abandoned and decaying. No real dialogue with the new-natives had been established. The admiral and Simon Roderick didn't know what to do next. They were considering sending a starship to rendezvous with the big captured asteroid that was in a two-thousand-kilometer polar orbit. Sections of the planet's space-based industry were obviously still functioning, although a lot of the stations and microgee modules had been destroyed when the induction webs were eliminated. If nothing else, the starships could take the surviving orbital industrial facilities back to Earth; that would show some kind of gain on the balance sheet.
In the meantime, the governor advised, they were probably going to boost the platoons straight back up to orbit, although there were worries about the availability of hydrogen at the spaceports that had already been secured. Roseport spaceport did have several storage tanks full, but the refinery itself had been switched off. The engineers were going over it now to see if they could restart production.
Lawrence drove one of the jeeps, with half of 435NK9 as his passengers. They were eighth in the long convoy as it wound back along the route it had taken to the factory. It was slow going; the road was thoroughly overgrown with tiger-grass and creepers, although there was evidence that some kind of vehicles still used it occasionally. Lawrence remembered the Great Loop Highway back on Thallspring and quietly wished for something that clear and level again.
The terrain they were driving through was hilly, a landscape of crumpled valleys and short, awkward slopes. Tall trees thrived along the upper slopes of the ridges, projecting impossibly slim spires above the forest roof. Topped with fluffy violet leaf plumes, they looked like the battle pennants of some medieval army marching to war. Down in the valley floors the trees were fat bruisers, nearly spherical, their gray-silver bark bristling with hard, venomous thorns to repel wood-drillers and acidlice. The upper half of their swollen boles sprouted concentric circles of whip branches, shaking small leathery leaves in the breeze to produce a continuous discordant clattering. They grew together in an almost solid fence, pushing and straining at each other as decades-long battles were fought for ground and light. Those that lost and died were riddled with holes as animals burrowed their nests into the rotting wood. Swarms of fungus leeched to the crumbling bark, producing a glistening rampage of color as they wept glutinous fluids saturated with spores. Ferns and tuber leaves dominated the dim floor of the forest, banishing tiger-grass and bushes, while carnivorous coilwraiths hung from forks in the overhead branches to catch insects amid their wriggling fronds.
The road reached the first swath of forest a couple of kilometers from the factory. Its builders had tried to avoid the trees where possible, curving it around along valley walls or letting it run beside the fast-flowing streams. As a consequence, the lead vehicle could rarely see more than two or three hundred meters ahead.
Lawrence frowned as they began to slow. He couldn't see any reason for it. The road was a mess, sure, but it didn't pose too much of a problem for their vehicles. They weren't even in the forest yet; it was running along the side of them fifty meters away. Up ahead there was a sharp curve around the base of a small hill. But there was no barrier, nothing blocking the track.
"What's happening?" he asked over the command link. They were almost stationary now.
"Something up ahead. The ground's moving."
"Moving?" Lawrence didn't understand.
"Can you hear that?" Nic asked.
Lawrence braked to a halt. "Hear
what?" He ordered his AS to turn up the Skin's audio sensitivity. That was when he realized the jeep was shaking slightly.
"That!" Nic insisted.
The Skin's receptors were picking up a bass rumbling.
"Six-nine-three and Seven-six-two, deploy forward with carbines," Captain Lyaute ordered. "Five-four-one, watch our tail."
Skins were jumping down from the jeeps, moving forward in a double buddy formation. Squat muzzles had emerged from their arm carapaces.
Lawrence didn't like the situation at all. None of his briefings had mentioned this being an earthquake zone.
The herd of macrorexes lumbered around the side of the mountain, a wall of beasts over eight meters high, with the smallest weighing in at ten tons. Unlike Earth's dinosaurs, they didn't have long necks and tails. Their bodies were husky cylinders fifteen meters in length, with three sets of legs. It was an arrangement that allowed them to move in a sequence of synchronized jumps, arching their spine so that a wave motion rippled down their dorsal column, each set of legs bounding forward in unison. A flattened heart-shaped head rose and fell as the body undulated, swinging occasionally from side to side as far as the stumpy neck permitted. The end of the jaw was caged by three curving tusks longer than a man's arm, two pointing up, one down; they opened and closed in a steady rhythm. The sides of the head swept together in a series of bladelike triangular fins that looked as if they could cut through steel. Their eyes were invisible somewhere among the sharply crinkled bone ridges of the upper skull.