“The analysts figure broods hatch, go on for a while, and die,” Abbado said, reading from a sidebar focused for his eyes only. “The critters must die or there wouldn’t be anything left but bare rock.”
“Can we spray the eggs before they hatch, Sarge?” Foley asked.
“Hell, Analysis doesn’t know for sure they come from eggs,” Abbado said. “Maybe, but for now we’ve got to figure on eliminating a swarm when they’re looking pretty much the way that one was.”
He didn’t even try to keep the disgust out of his tone. Everything on Bezant in the database had come from orbital imagery and a few automated probes to sample the microbiota. Nobody’d bothered to put scouts on the ground. C41 had gotten a lot of tough missions, but Abbado had never before been handed one where he’d had so little hard data to go on.
“Do we have electric fencing?” Horgen asked. “Only it’d take a hell of a lot of fence if the whole settlement area’s going to be covered.”
“That’s one problem,” said Abbado, “but they don’t think fences would stop them—”
He ran the chip back to a close-up of the swarm’s advancing front.
“—and there I got to agree with Analysis. These things dam creeks so they can cross and weave rafts to get over rivers. A fence isn’t even going to slow them down.”
“So what is?” Methie asked.
“We are,” said Abbado. “With our stingers. They can’t run as fast as a man, and they can’t even squirt you without you let them get inside ten feet or so. In broken terrain it’ll be a problem, and they come by the righteous shitload. Fifty, sixty thousand Analysis figures. If a swarm heads in the direction of the settlement, we get in front of them and shoot every mother’s son.”
“Krishna,” Caldwell repeated.
“Now, the chance of a swarm of those critters being in the wrong place may not be very high,” Abbado continued as he indexed to the next set of images. “The large carnivores have overlapping territories, and it’ll be a while before we stop having to kill the ones that replaced the ones we killed the week before.”
An animal with four legs, a short body, and a whip-thin neck appeared in the projection area.
“These’re ambush hunters,” Abbado said, “and they charge at at least 65 miles an hour because that’s what the one they spotted here was doing.”
“Shit,” muttered Matushek. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Esther Meyer sat on her bunk with her helmet on. She viewed the Bezant data at 100 percent on her visor, completely blocking her sight of the compartment around her. Several strikers played cards on a footlocker elsewhere in the room. She was aware of their voices, but the words didn’t impinge on a consciousness focused on the vessel’s destination.
“Hey Essie.”
“Besides being toxic at least to native lifeforms,” said a voiceover from the database as a vine uncoiled in Meyer’s apparent field of view, “this species appears to digest animal carcasses through rootlets—”
“Meyer! You there?” Knuckles rapped on her helmet.
Meyer flipped up the visor. “Nessman, you got a problem?” she snapped. She didn’t like having her concentration broken, and she was plenty willing to revert relations with the willowy blond striker to their old hostile footing.
“Aw, Essie, I’m sorry,” Nessman said, looking and sounding contrite. “I just wanted to know what you think about this place. Did you see what it said about disease? The colonists all need immune boosters!”
“Yeah, I saw,” Meyer said. She ducked forward to lift off her helmet so that she wouldn’t bang it against the upper bunk. “What’s the big deal? We’ve all got boosters since basic training.”
The booster was a porous ceramic shell the size of a little finger implanted in the user’s left hip. It was a biofactory that cleaned the user’s body of everything from viruses to parasites that were almost big enough to see with the naked eye.
The tradeoff for this protection was that each booster cost as much as a mid-quality aircar. For the military, that expense was reasonable. There was no point in training and transporting troops to a distant planet only to have them die of disease even before they closed with the Kalendru.