Greenflies Read online

  So that was what this was about.

  “I stand by my report, sir,” said Captain Arnold, “What Gamma Team did was unnatural.”

  “Son…”

  “General, when I tell you that my team consisted of the best men I had ever served with, I do not mean that they possessed character, although in retrospect, I’d say they did. I mean they were the best at what they did. Skilled paratroopers. Crack shots. Tough as nails. And we got our asses handed to us by the Greenflies. The capabilities I saw that day…”

  “By the Greenflies?” prompted Lassiter.

  “No sir. That was nothing I hadn’t seen in the tapes. I’m talking about Gamma Team. Pairs of them dropped onto a single surface the size of a large van with precision at speeds that should have broken their legs if not their spines. Only knowing now who that was, I saw a man in his fifties drop onto an alien at somewhere around fifty miles per hour and beat him to death with an electrified stick. I saw a man dive into a marsh with no hesitation and, with only one other person’s help, wrestle a Greenfly into submission.”

  “Their report said they shocked the Greenfly,” Lassiter interrupted.

  “Their report is a lie. I saw what electricity in a marsh looks like, and they captured that Greenfly through pure hand to hand. And the weirdest thing is, the woman doctor. She didn’t even blink twice when she saw her squad tackling the aliens hand-to-hand. Why are they fielding a woman? How can she possibly be up to these standards?”

  “Captain, the abilities you’re talking about. They haven’t appeared in Gamma Team’s training.”

  “Then they are holding back in training,” Captain Arnold held firm, “I don’t know whether it is enhanced armor they’re wearing or something else, but the things I saw them do, no man could do. And their entire team was doing them…”

  General Lassiter stopped him with a raised hand and leaned forward, “Captain, if I believe you, for this and other anomalies I’ve found in their files, what would you suggest I do? Their team’s record goes back quite a ways, and there’s no suggestion that their alleged abilities are a sinister alien plot. Besides, I would think you would be the first to be on their side. They saved your life, after all.”

  “My suggestion, sir,” Captain Arnold began, “Would be to find out the source of their advantages and give it to the rest of us. My team deserved every resource allocated to Gamma Team. If they had been given such, they’d still be here today. We’re all jumping out of the same planes. We all deserve the same odds.”

  “Very well, Captain. I’m assembling a new team, that will take Beta’s name. It will be led by my former adjutant, also with extensive special forces training, and I’d like you to be the comm man. Second in command of what should shortly be the elite unit. The purpose of this team will be just as you say, to seek out and employ new technologies and tactics for use at the squad level. As we unravel the alien technology, you’ll receive the fruits of that research first, and, as you suggest, if we find any of the current teams are employing a secret advantage, we will investigate that and make it available to you.”

  Captain Arnold replied, “Sir, I don’t even have medical clearance yet…”

  “You will, son. I’ll sidetrack the psych boys if they try to pull some post-trauma bullshit. The meat of it is, if you want to go back out there, there will be a spot on the best trained and equipped team, the new Beta. Officially, it will report to Caufield, but if there is something odd about Gamma Team, rest assured she’s behind it. Beta will answer to me. Help me out, and we’ll figure out what these Gamma boys are up to. Give everyone a fighting chance.”

  “Absolutely, General.”

  Chapter 13: The Plan

  “Dang, he can make sense of that?” asked Meg.

  “Technically he’s an ‘it’, but yes,” corrected Butler.

  “What?”

  “Remember that it’s not human and doesn’t have human attributes such as gender. At this point, we can say it’s likely that the Greenflies don’t reproduce sexually. They’re all the same, we think. So, Greenbeard is an ‘it’, not a ‘he.’ Most of us refer to him as male, anyways, as Greenbeard is certainly not… dainty. Anyways, in answer to your question, yes, he seems to comprehend the strobe very well. In fact, he has said the method of communication is irritatingly slow.”

  Greenbeard was sitting in his standard sphinx-like posture, watching a flashlight next to Butler. A computer-controlled camera shutter had been affixed to the flashlight, to provide a variable strobe. More importantly, the shutter blocked the heat signature of the flashlight in a patterned manner, Morse code. Currently, the computer was feeding Greenbeard an advanced English grammar textbook. The strobe was discernible by the human eye, but it wouldn’t have taken much of an increase in shutter speed to change that. This was the first chance that Meg had had to see the thing first hand since she started working with Butler. Most of the Xenosociology had been in this room and seen the living Greenfly; it was one of the perks.

  “That’s slow?” asked Meg, moving to get a better view of the strobe.

  Greenbeard slammed against the glass, sending Meg bolting across the observation room. Her hand was on the door knob as she looked back. Greenbeard had just as quickly resumed his seated posture and was watching the strobe raptly again. With his right eye still spider-webbed with cracks, it was easy to remember how he had hovered over her in the pick-up truck, how he had tried to kill her after he had already taken Macon’s life. Butler was wrong. It was impossible to think of Greenbeard as an ‘it.’ They had already been too close.

  “He doesn’t like it when a lesson is interrupted,” explained Butler, “and that’s the only way other than his own language he knows to express it in.

  “Keep in mind his own language is pictograms, fractal pictograms where the center of the pattern expresses an idea, and the individual branches of the pattern reflect finer aspects of the idea, and the branching pattern continues down at least two more levels. All of it changes over time, at a rate of several times per second. It’s difficult to make comparisons, but we believe the language transmits several times the information of the average human’s reading rate. The strobe is only about the rate of human speech. So, to him, it’s slow. Are you alright?”

  Meg rejoined him slowly, “Yeah, just had a flashback.”

  The project to establish communication with Greenbeard had become more vital recently, since the detectors had gone blank and the Greenflies silent. The Greenflies certainly hadn’t left the system, as the trailing Trojans were still aswarm with their obvious activity. Had they finished sampling and simply gone on to mine the solar system peacefully? Only Greenbeard had that answer.

  “So, he has talked to you, right?” she asked.

  “Poorly. He’s an avid learner, as you’ve seen, but most human nouns have no meaning to him. The vocabulary will just take time.”

  Greenbeard began signaling something of his own, as Butler could see through a monitor beneath the strobe. When Greenbeard responded, he flared his while body in the infrared so the computer couldn’t possibly miss it. He had told Butler it was similar to a technique the Greenflies used at long distance, when communicating to each other from different bodies in space, barely in visual range. In that case, they could sacrifice the pictographs for solely a temporal pattern.

  “I recognize this species,” the computer display read.

  Butler deactivated the computer translation of the grammar book and pulled up a keyboard for direct communication with the Greenfly.

  “What species?” he asked.

  “The species standing with Butler,” Greenbeard replied.

  “This is Meg. She is human,” Butler answered.

  Greenbeard’s remaining eye refocused on Meg and moved across her, focusing primarily on her face, “No. It is not. It is the species that hurt me. I was sent to sample the species, and the species resisted.”

  Butler looked up at Meg, “I never knew you were the one that injured his ey
e. I always thought it was someone on Gamma Team. He’s probably talking about your genetic anomaly. As far as he is concerned, that makes you a separate species. They have no genetic diversity at all, themselves. How do you think I should respond?”

  “Ask him why he did what he did?”

  Butler paused, then typed, “Meg wants to know why you tried to sample her.”

  “The species Meg qualifies as a species of second highest priority. Like the species human, the species Meg is an apex predator megafauna. Apex predators possess genes of prey species in their digestive organs,” said Greenbeard.

  “What is a species of highest priority?”asked Butler.

  “Scavengers.”

  “This is all new,” said Butler, “We scanned in a high school biology textbook this morning. It’s apparently given him more of a common frame of reference than the language books, math textbooks, or nature television. He couldn’t understand any history whatsoever. Biology of classification, in the case of the Greenflies, is our common denominator.”

  “Why do you sample species?”he typed out.

  “To domesticate,” it replied.

  “How do you domesticate them?”

  The Greenfly paused, “We alter the species until they perform their work.”

  “Like the bees?” Meg asked Butler.

  “It makes a kind of sense. Millions of years ago, they sampled species of earth, and they decided bees would make a good weapon on planets rich in oxygen. Their ability to fly; their complicated stinger. The Greenflies changed their bodies a little but mostly changed their instinctual behavior. The Greenflies made the bees dependent on the gun to provide them oxygen, a home, maybe even reproductive ability. In return, when the trigger is pressed and the muzzle opens, the bee flies straight forward and stings something.”

  “Are all their equipment just domesticated animals?” asked Meg.

  Butler nodded and repeated the question through the IR beam.

  “No,”Greenbeard replied, “Greenflies, plasma guns, and (do not know word) are original designs.”

  “Designs?”asked Meg.

  “We suspected the Greenflies were artificial. I guess they realize it too,” said Butler.

  He typed out on the keyboard, “What are you designs of?”

  “Animal for digging rock, animal for cutting rock, and animal for separating rock.”

  Butler stood stunned for a minute, “I meant to ask who or what designed them, but Greenbeard appears to be aware of their actual purpose. They were miners, asteroid miners probably. The plasma cannons were meant to be mining tools, and some creature we don’t know about yet was built to refine the ore.”

  “Who designed you?” he typed out.

  “(do not know word.)”

  “Crap,” said Meg.

  “Wait a minute,” said Butler, “If he realizes he was designed, perhaps he also realizes he was built.”

  He typed, “Greenbeard, who built you?”

  There was a long pause, “A whale.”

  “He thinks a whale built him?”asked Meg.

  “It’s just the closest thing he’s read about so far. He has no grasp of anything artificial, remember. I think he’s talking about a ship.”

  He typed out, “Do Greenflies travel in this whale?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where is the whale?”

  “(invalid input)”stated the computer about Greenbeard’s reply.

  “That was my own fault,”said Butler, “He can’t seem to relay units of distance, time, volume, anything. We spent a whole day trying to work out the problem, and eventually we just told the computer to shelve the data whenever Greenbeard gives a reply in that format. At least until the mathematicians can decipher what the hell it means. He seems to describe all dimensions, both time and space, and all sub-categories of those measurements, in the same unit. It would be as if someone described volume in seconds. The mathematicians we asked about it think the Greenflies describe the universe in a five-dimensional unit, and the use of it just changes with context. Let me try a different way of asking.”

  “Is the Whaleship in our solar system? Is it near Troy?”

  “Yes. The Whaleship is at Troy.”

  “The Whaleship enters a star system, samples the species there, domesticates some of them, and moves to another star system?” Butler typed into the computer.

  “No. The Whaleship is called to the star system by a (do not know word) when the star system is ready. The Greenflies sample all available megafauna species up to the (do not know word) ratio. The ecology of the star system is modeled. Megafaunal candidate species are chosen, and all variations of that species are sampled up to (do not know word) ratio by Greenflies and domesticated species. Microbial life is sampled up to (do not know word) ratio. Once sampling is completed, the ecology of the star system is reset to foster biodiversity. The Whaleship leaves.”

  Meg said, “I really don’t like the sound of that.”

  Butler just typed, “How is the ecology reset?”

  “Populations of dominant species are reduced to increase biodiversity.”

  “They aren’t just going to go away when they’re done,” said Meg.

  “No,” Butler replied. “For whatever reason, they plan to destroy humans and any other life they regard as dominant in order for other life forms to flourish. They want to make sure they’re not destroying anything useful before they weed us out. The military has had the right idea all along.”

  Greenbeard remained stationary in his sphinx posture, never having moved, other than his writhing skin, during the conversation. Even as the pair rushed out the door on the other side of the glass, he remained unmoving. He flashed up a pictograph message on his skin which loosely translated to irritation that the humans had failed to start another book through the IR beam. Were the humans a domesticated species, he felt certain the Whaleship would cut off their blood supply for such carelessness.

  Anna waited behind the police lines. The state troopers had arrived within minutes of her call, but the federal agents were taking far longer than she expected. It had been over an hour since she called, and the graduate students were getting antsy.

  This was not the sort of thing Dr. Anna Lions had much experience with. She’d been conducting paleontological research here in Montana for nearly a decade, one semester in the classroom at University of Michigan, the rest of her year out here in the badlands. Grad students would come and go, but the job was always the same: the slow, careful extraction of one type of stone, that of biological origin, from everything else. She was adept at dealing with brushes, canvases, and even, to a certain degree, troublesome local kids. Her experience with law enforcement ended with the county sheriff until today.

  She was in her late thirties, but the years of sun had given her face a little more maturity than she deserved. With her hair, half blond and half faded to gray, she looked very much like a young Jane Goodall (a Jane Goodall who swung a rock hammer all day). Her garb was brown and khaki, from her boots to her tool belt. As she often said, if her clothes weren’t brown when she put them on, they’d certainly be brown by the time she took them off. Right now, the she was huddled within three layers of brown cloth, not quite shivering in the Montana evening wind.

  Five state trooper SUVs had answered her call, and now they sat in a ring around the find, a black hole in the middle of their excavation site. The badlands were rugged, but Anna had chosen a relatively flat surface to establish her dig. While many millions of years ago, this small rise had been a river embankment, now it was a flat spot, barely worth calling a plateau, in a rilled landscape. Within the ring of SUVs was the hacked earth of the dig, the ominous black hole, and a few tarps covering more conventional discoveries. The dig crew’s vehicles were a hundred yards up the road. As small as the rise was, it had been too epic a climb for Anna’s old RV.

  The crew themselves were standing beside one of the SUVs not far away. The three of them, all grad students, certainly hadn
’t expected to discover alien life for their field credits, but Anna felt they were handling the situation fairly calmly. She was more concerned about how they would be treated by the federal authorities when they arrived. There were certainly enough conspiracy theories about to make her wonder as to whether they would all be prisoners by the end of the day. One of the grads, Craig, the one who had descended into the cavern with her, hadn’t wanted to contact the authorities at all. However, with news of battles from all over the world and the occasional flash of blue up in the sky, Anna had felt obligated to report the discovery.

  She caught sight of the Blackhawks a long way off. She was a little taken aback, having expected trucks or Humvees rather than a formation of a dozen helicopters. Despite the great distance at which she first caught sight of them, the fast-moving aircraft were on her position in a little under a minute. Great winds blasted through the dig site, sending tarps and small pieces of equipment flying. Anna and her students bounded into action, racing around the few tarps that appeared to be holding and pinning them into place with hammers and spikes. The cursing was constant; it was only at moments like these that Anna fully appreciated the vocabulary of modern college students.

  The last of the Blackhawks settled down with its front wheel dead in the center of an uncovered fossil bed. A set of men in black coveralls emerged, one clearly in command, issuing orders to subordinates. The leader of these fossil site desecrators approached Anna and her students as his subordinates swarmed the site, taking pictures, making notes on clipboards, and conversing with the state police present here. As the lead man approached Anna, he grabbed a section of tarp flapping in the breeze and handed it to her, a gesture that might have been helpful if he had not caused the trouble in the first place. The rotors of the Blackhawks spun down with a whine, and conversation became possible once more.

  “Dr. Lions?”he asked, before continuing without an acknowledgment. “I’m Jim Farcus. I’d like to ask you a few questions before we take over the site.”