Greenflies Read online

  Meg looked around the room at the faces of Gamma Team. They were totally nonreactive at what was being said. She began to feel that every smile, every laugh she had seen from them was artificial, feigned.

  “They’re not normal, are they?”

  “No, they are not.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “No, they are not,” Dr. Barnard said, “The story begins with Maria’s predecessor, a man with which I have had far too much experience. To his credit, he was a fine military mind with a firm background in nearly every area of science, but I suspect he made the usual sale to the devil to achieve his insight and position. For two and a half decades, Claude Garette orchestrated some of the ugliest abuses of mankind imaginable, all in the names of science and national security.

  “You’ve probably heard stories of simulated biological weapons tests on American troops, anomalous chemical traces in battlefields such as the Persian Gulf, or military funding of steroids for athletes in competition. Claude was behind all of these things and much worse. For while, like Maria, his office was officially assigned covert operations overseas, his mandate included research into advanced tactics, unconventional warfare, and superior soldiers. He constantly hunted personnel reports for those who had performed superhuman feats to save fellow soldiers, those who healed unhealable injuries, and generally those who did what others could not.

  “In the late seventies, something fell into his lap, quite unexpectedly. A soldier performing a covert mission in Cambodia long after the war had been officially over, had been shot in the head and survived. More than that, he appeared to retain all of his intellectual faculties and motor skills. The one thing he lacked was the full richness of human emotion. You see, the bullet had passed more or less harmlessly through non-essential parts of his neocortex and lodged in his amygdala. In removing the bullet, the surgeons were forced to excise that region of his brain. You might say the amygdala is a regulator of emotion. While the stimulus for an emotion is not there, and the output is expressed elsewhere, if the feeling does not pass through that region, it is simply not felt.

  “There were experiments on dogs at the beginning of the century, where that region of the brain was removed. Those dogs lost all sense of fear, but they could also no longer become angry. The soldier had become like those creatures. He could stare unflinchingly into the barrel of a gun, and, it was discovered, kill without remorse. But the greatest surprise was that he had become much quicker and more decisive in action. You see, the amygdala is the home of the fight-or-flight reflex, the place where the emotional decision is made whether to run or to do battle. Now that they had a soldier for comparison, it became clear that the decision, in a normal person, takes time. Then-Lieutenant Thomas Marshal, in reacting without feeling, in acting without taking the time to decide whether he should be afraid, in never even wondering whether he should be acting or not, had shaved nearly half the time off of every reflex he possessed.”

  Meg looked up at Colonel Marshal. By way of demonstration, he bowed to show the top of his head. She had never noticed before, but there was an ugly scar, right at the apex, visible through his cropped hair. It was a square with unnaturally straight borders.

  “Claude marveled at the things this young man could do. He could best martial artists with only his basic hand-to-hand training. He was extremely resistant to pain; he still felt every jab, but he no longer had an emotional response to the pain. He was physiologically incapable of panic. He had been trained as a paratrooper, and it was discovered his new reflexes and pain tolerance allowed him greater leeway in the speed at which he could take landings. And, of course, there was his total lack of remorse. Purely by accident, Claude had stumbled upon what he regarded as a perfect soldier.

  “But there was a price. In the discovery of his new abilities, Lieutenant Marshal had been motivated by curiosity, but as that waned, there was nothing to replace it. The surgeons had also robbed him of motivation. With no emotional sense of pleasure or accomplishment, why exert his new abilities? He became apathetic, indifferent. He saw no point in obeying his superiors or fear in the repercussions. He would eat to stop being hungry and sleep to stop being tired, but that was the extent of his interest in life.

  “Claude would not tolerate this. After a hundred dead ends, he had found a soldier to fulfill his needs. His hope was that the process was repeatable, and platoons of soldiers such as Lieutenant Marshal would be unstoppable. So, he began to experiment with means to motivate someone with no sense of pleasure and a tolerance for pain. Drugs to induce suggestibility, electroshock, brainwashing and the clincher, addiction. The brain does not need an emotional response to love a chemical. He turned the young Lieutenant into an addict, an addict whose fix was proportional to the degree which he completed his duties. In conjunction with more conventional indoctrination techniques, Claude removed what was left of the young man’s soul.

  “In the subsequent years, more experiments were performed. To my knowledge, no healthy subjects were ever put under the knife. However, Claude did scour the globe for cases of cancer or traumatic injury that could be treated by this surgery. Eventually, a new cancer therapy became available, gamma scalpel irradiation. By this method, a region of the brain may be destroyed by radiation without ever cutting the skin. The number of potential candidates sky-rocketed with the simpler procedure. The drugs evolved, as well. These days, the team members are pumped full of adrenaline-stimulators to replace the positive aspects of the fight-or-flight reflex, and they are given chemical training aids that would astonish even those in professional sports.

  “Over the years, I believe there were some sixty participants in these experiments, though few made it into the Gamma Teams. Some died in surgery. Others committed suicide shortly thereafter. Some steadfastly refused to become indoctrinated into… essentially slavery. Some died in the field. Those in this room are the ones that are left, mostly cancer survivors. When Claude mercifully died two years back, his files and charges fell to Maria, who was dismayed to learn of what he had done. She was dismayed, but she continued to field his team. Not to judge her too harshly, if she had come forward, the members of Gamma Team would be in an asylum at this point instead of defending our planet.”

  Meg interrupted, “How do you know all of this?”

  “I’ve always known. I railed against Claude’s programs for years but was kept silent by a series of departmental directives and gag orders. That doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Their origin is as gray a moral issue as any I can imagine, but we need them right now. I’d object to the creation of any more of their kind, and I’d scream to high heaven before allowing them to alter a healthy young man, but I could not condone pulling the current Gamma Team from service.”

  All this had been said with the six members of the team within fifteen feet, and not one of them had reacted.

  Chapter 15: Weapons

  The two shells approached Earth orbit, still very close together in cosmic terms but destined for very different parts of the planet. They were each conical, with the wide end of the cone a gentle curve. In human terms, they were only a few meters in height, and perhaps a meter across at the base. In a very different life, these two shells might have been marine creatures, fixed to the rocky sea floor, immersed in an ocean of ethanol. Millions of years ago, however, a choice was made. The Greenflies had decided the durability of these creatures warranted their domestication, and forever their destiny was changed. They were now delivery vessels for more valuable and vulnerable cargo.

  They followed their courses mindlessly, having no thrusters or attitude control even if they could choose to redirect themselves. Their course had been predetermined by the Greenflies, and they had been hurled out into space several months ago, on the first day of the sampling missions. While the cargo could have been delivered via teleporting transport ship, there was no hurry, and it was important to keep the cargo separate from the Greenflies or their teleporting craft. The creature in each hold, howe
ver useful, was decidedly free-willed, and no amount of genetic tinkering had been able to change that. Whaleships had been destroyed through failure to separate the crew and the Harvester creatures.

  The shells were no longer in sight of each other. One was destined for the liquid water oceans of this world, near a deep ocean subducted trench. The other was being sent to the interior of the largest continent, away from most human settlement. Even when the shells were first sent, the Greenflies had been aware that there was an intelligent species upon the planet, a magic-using one at that. It was important that the Harvester not encounter such a species early in its life cycle. That could seriously jaundice its performance.

  An aura of pink plasma began dancing across the edges of the cone aimed at Asia. The heat in the interior began to creep up, although the shell itself was in no danger of failing. Swarms of ten-limbed insect-like creatures began to creep from pores in the shell. Each was barely a centimeter across, but they emerged in sufficient numbers to cover the cone, save the base. Their carapaces were mirrored, and they firmly planted their ventral side against the shell, an adhesive mechanism similar to the Greenflies’ holding them there rigidly. The resulting visible effect was as if the cone was a compound mirror of millions of small circles. The pink plasma darted around the planted bugs, but their bodies tolerated the heat and insulated the interior of the shell. Prior to domestication, the mirror bugs had been a space-based race, capable of colonizing planets by surviving re-entry.

  The shell continued to plunge through the atmosphere, towards a heavily clouded, white landscape below. The Harvester stirred in the interior, the heat waking it from its long, cold-induced nap. It stretched tendrils to brace itself against its spherical chamber, for the inevitable shock.

  Clouds parted for the shell as it slammed into the troposphere. The thick air ripped off clods of mirrored insects from the hull, sending them sparkling off into the sky. A sonic boom rippled across the landscape. There were very few creatures to hear it, though, and snow was hiding the ground from view. It was far from an ideal site for the Harvester, and certainly a poor season, but it was hoped the remote location would provide insulation from humanity.

  When the shell hit the snow, the force of the impact spiraled up the cone, exploding the structure outward. A crater of earth and snow was dug, forcing the nearby trees over. Little shards of shell and the few mirror bugs still remaining were scattered into the forest, setting branches alight with their residual heat. All that was left in the center of the crater was the base of the cone and a gelatinous orange creature. The Harvester, with no discernible anatomy, resembled a thirty kilo jello mold, left in the center of a meteorite impact crater.

  The Harvester felt the chill wind on its surface, within its range of tolerance for the moment, but capable of putting it back to sleep if it was maintained. It began to creep its way out of the crater, moving in much the same way as a snail or slug. When it reached the edge of the crater, the snow-line, it hesitated before beginning its trek across the snow. The conflicting impulses between seeking warmth and seeking prey caused it to shiver and quake. Eventually the artificially implanted instinct to hunt overcame its defensive desire to stay on the warm surface, and it crept onto the snow. A thin layer of its tissue fell asleep at direct contact with the snow, and it flopped across the snow at a rate most terrestrial creatures would dismiss as lying down.

  Eventually, a layer of tissue around its entire body followed suit, falling asleep from the cold. It began to roll along on this skin of inactive tissue, picking up the pace significantly. Still, it found the pickings slim.

  The first creature it encountered was a pine tree, which, like the Harvester itself, had a layer of inactive tissue to face the world. With concerted effort, the Harvester was sure it could penetrate to the interior, but the pine tree didn’t seem to be of much use anyways. The Harvester continued to roll through the forest.

  It took some time before it had traveled far enough away from the impact site that the local animals weren’t spooked. Still, animals kept their distance from the alien creature, and the Harvester lacked the sensory ability to find them. It could hear, but normally it relied upon the exquisitely sensitive sense of touch. With its skin deadened by the cold, the world was a very dark place. Prey could have been a few meters in front of the Harvester, and it would’ve only sensed the slope of the ground and the whistling wind.

  When prey did arrive, there was no sensory warning. The wolf loped out of the forest and pawed the pile of orange goo. At first, the Harvester did not respond. With its outer tissues asleep, it was barely capable of forming a tendril, much less attacking. The wolf was able to investigate the Harvester for over a minute, pawing and nibbling. When the wolf’s warm slobber had thawed a small portion of the Harvester’s skin, it lashed out.

  At first, the wolf was under the impression that it was eating the Harvester. Then came a burst of pain from the lining of its throat as the Harvester’s tendrils carved a way into the wolf’s interior. The wolf began to thrash and bite, but the teeth were harmless to the Harvester’s undifferentiated interior. A creature with no blood nor organs cannot be torn asunder. The Harvester continued to push into the wolf’s maw, pulling itself along the creature’s teeth with its warming skin. A bulge formed in the wolf’s throat, as the bulk of the alien creature constricted the wolf’s trachea. The wolf desperately thrashed and attempted to hack, but nothing would emerge from its mouth, neither air nor alien.

  Halfway into the wolf, the Harvester became dimly aware of other creatures around. The rest of the wolf’s pack was panicking as well, baying and growling at their member’s misfortune. The Harvester could hear them now that the wolf’s heat and aggression was awaking its tissue. The Harvester could not have asked for a more favorable initial prey, a scavenging creature that traveled in groups. With any further luck, the entire pack would belong to the Harvester shortly.

  The creature was nearly completely inside the wolf, now, and its struggling was growing feeble. It was thrashing on the ground now, lacking the breath to maintain its feet. The bulge visible through its fur had expanded from the creature’s throat to its belly, making the wolf look like it had tried to consume something in one piece like a snake. The other wolves were circling, whimpering.

  Even as the Harvester was completing its invasion, it was learning. Tiny tendrils, small enough to make the native cells look like mountains, were finding their way to nerves, blood vessels, and muscle. There were precious few creatures in the universe that the Harvester could not understand given the opportunity. It felt the electrical current moving along the nerves and smelled the neurotransmitters wafting between the gigantic nerve cells. Its tendrils waved through the gaps at synapses freely, with ample space on either side. It extended a net into a small artery, and it felt the menagerie of native cells and invading bacteria pulsing along with the plasma. Its tendrils lashed around these cells and constricted them to death, as a giant snake might do, solely to investigate their contents. The Harvester was building a map of the wolf, or more appropriately a material inventory. It was quite sure it could thrive here.

  The pulse of the blood was feeble now as the Harvester completely entered the interstitium of the creature. Tendrils knit together the wound in the throat, sealing it with sutures trimmed from the lining of throat itself. The Harvester used almost no chemical action on its host. One could never be sure with an alien species what substances might prove toxic. Instead, it operated mechanically, at a scale smaller than that of the individual cells of its host. No human surgeon had ever operated with the rapidity and precision of the Harvester.

  The wolf was laying on its side now, spent and little more than half conscious. The Harvester heard the other wolves moving about, whimpering but not yet investigating. The Harvester guessed it had the mass to incapacitate three or four more of the creatures before it would have to rest. The wolves would make excellent hosts, of that it was sure. The tissues of this species were edible, and
the interior of the creature was homeostatically warm and wet. There would be functional issues, of course. How well would the nervous systems of multiple wolves interact together when that clearly was not part of their natural biology? Would there be a way to make the resulting composite fast, functional, and dangerous? Aesthetic considerations were also upon the Harvester’s mind, a tendency the Whaleship and the Greenflies despised in their loose-leashed cousin.

  As another member of the wolf’s pack was investigating the wolf’s prone form, the Harvester’s luck ran out. A loud blast rang out from someplace near the fallen creature. While the Harvester would soon learn much about firearms, it had no idea what the rifle blast might signify. The rest of the wolves cleared off, obviously sensing danger. The Harvester had no idea what was going on in the outside world. While it could still hear quite well, it had no capacity to interact with the wolf’s senses, at least this early in the process. The wolf was in no condition to volunteer its natural reaction to the environment either. Its heart barely beat after the lengthy asphyxiation of the Harvester’s entrance.

  The tendrils near the surface of the wolf could hear something approach through the snow. It was bipedal, judging from the footfalls, and moving with a sense of purpose. The Harvester was filled with a sense of dread. It had been told to be afraid of a few animals which the Whaleship judged might be a threat to the Harvester, and one of them was a biped. The Harvester strove to respond to the threat, but it was still in the most preliminary of stages of understanding the body it now occupied. It attempted to stir the wolf, its tendrils forcing open calcium gates everywhere in the animal, from its heart to its skeletal muscle.