A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 1 The Stench

We smelled it long before we saw it.

The stench came rolling over the hills like a force of nature. I thought of great billowing thunderclouds of microscopic particles. I thought of corrosive chemicals attacking my bronchi, bizarre molecules bonding to enzyme sites in my bloodstream and liver. I thought of tiny alien creatures setting up housekeeping in my lungs. I thought of emigrating to the moon. Anything to be away from here.

The smell was almost a visible presence, and it was strong enough to knock down a house. Even filtered through the hoods, it was intolerable. It smelled like everything bad in the world, all in one place and distilled down to its most horrible essence. It smelled like putrefaction in a perfume factory. It smelled like day-old vomit and burning sulfur, swamp gas and rotten cheese. It smelled like worms and lawyers and last year's politics.

"Hooa! Lordy! What is that?" hollered one of the Texas boys. "Did we hit a skunk?"

"Smells more like lawyer."

"What's the difference?"

"Nobody wants to hit a skunk."

"Welcome to Mexico," said somebody in the back. "Land of a thousand exciting adventures."

"Cap'n," asked one of the new kids. "You ever smelled anything like that before?"

Before I could speak, the same voice in the back replied nastily, "It's the barrio. This is the largest one in the world. They all smell like that."

"Only until we flush the gringos out." I recognized Lopez's softly accented voice. "It's the leftover mayonnaise and white bread you're smelling."

"Cool it," I said. "You've got more important things to worry about. A smell like that is strong enough to attract every carrion eater from here to Waco. Pass the word. Keep an eye out." My eyes were already starting to water, but I didn't dare lift my contamination hood to wipe them.

We were in the leading rollagon. Behind us followed a convoy of four more. We bounced across the denuded hills like a deranged herd of dinosaurs. The deforestation here hadn't been recent, but it had been thorough. Nothing was going to grow here again for a long, long time. Obviously, no Chtorran agency had been responsible for this. What a stupid war this was turning out to be-we were supposed to be defending the Terran ecology; instead we were burning it away, destroying it to save it.

According to the original plan, Terran plants should have been reasserting themselves by now. There should have been sprouts of green everywhere. Instead-we had a barren moonscape; a rumpled ash-colored terrain of uncomfortable hills and broken rock, all punctuated by blackened spikes, the remnants of a dead forest. A faint pink haze lay across the land; it gathered itself in dark brown pools and lurked in the deep gullies between the hills; and I wondered if this was the source of the smell. The pervasive undercast hid the horizon behind a bleary gray veil; distance just faded away into nothingness. Was this pale dry fog something Chtorran or another one of the delights engineered in the Oakland labs? It couldn't be the product of a living thing, could it? Nothing could live in this stench.

There was life here, of a sort; desperate, hungry, futile-and mostly Chtorran, of course. There were black ropy vines stretched across the ground, pulling at it like anchoring cables; and there were things growing on the vines, occasional bright patches of pink or blue or white, not quite flowers, but not quite anything else either. There were patches of dark ultraviolet fungus and occasional curtains of red gauze hanging from dead tree limbs. Deep in the shadowed gullies we could see thick rubbery scars of wormberry, and the occasional clump of leafy black basil. As we rolled on, we started seeing purple coleus, midnight ivy, and the first bright patches of scarlet kudzu.

The kudzu was turning out to be especially nasty. All it did was grow, but that was enough. It looked like blood-colored ivy, and it grew even faster than its Terran counterpart. It could blanket a house in weeks, a forest in months. You could cut it back easily enough, but you could never quite eradicate it completely. It just kept coming back. It had the tenacity of a bill collector-only quieter. In Georgia a small army of civilians had burned back several hundred acres of it that was starting to get too close to the edge of Atlanta and found the bones of cattle; dogs, cats, and more than a few missing people. No one was quite sure of the killing mechanism yet—or even if there was one. Maybe its danger was in its thickness; it was the perfect ground cover for small Chtorran predators. Like all things Chtorran, the best advice was still avoid it if you can.

Unless, of course, your job was to seek it out. Then you didn't have the luxury of that option.

This particular expedition was here at the specific request of the provisional governor of the Territory of North Mexico. We were one of three doing on-site mapping of the northeastern wilderness, to determine the success of last year's defoliation. I already knew the answer. I could have told them the answer before we'd left, before we'd even planned this operation. But-there are people who don't believe anything until they've sent somebody else to see-and even then, if it disagrees with what they want to hear, they still won't believe it.

The Brazilian mission had been sent back for reconsideration or put on hold or shifted to a back burner or ticketed for reevaluation or whatever you wanted to call it for the ninth or eleventh or hundred and third time. None of it had anything to do with the mission. All of it had everything to do with the political relationship of the North American Authority and the remaining nations of South America, several of which, including Brazil, had not reacted well to the Authority's recent annexation of South Mexico after that country's army and government had both collapsed in disarray. The relief operation was mounted from bases provided by the government of North Mexico. Despite, or perhaps because of, that cooperation, serious charges were being raised in many Latin capitals that the collapse of South Mexico had been engineered north of the Rio Grande.

I had no personal knowledge of the incident. I'd been involved elsewhere at the time, participating in an experiment in brainwashing, one of several then in practice. But I wouldn't have been surprised to find an American presence in the matter. South Mexico's not-so-secret-anymore cooperation with the Fourth World Majority in the abortive Gulf Coast invasion had not exactly won them friends in the hallowed halls of Congress. When it also turned out that they had allowed the invading forces to establish clandestine staging areas in the eastern wilderness, sixteen bills to declare war on South Mexico were introduced in the Senate. The President vowed to veto every one. The war against the Chtorr, she said, was more important, and this particular matter would be resolved in its own time and in its own way. She didn't specify what she meant, but after that the discussions on Capitol Hill became much more restrained.

Not too long after that, the United States and Canada created the North American Operations Authority, and each nation ceded specific parts of its national sovereignty to the new body; in particular the jurisdiction of all military and scientific bodies immediately involved in combating the ecological infestation. Both Mexicos had also been invited, but only the Republic of North Mexico had joined, and that only in exchange for significant trade agreements.

The obvious advantage of the Authority was that it allowed the United States to set the Moscow Treaties aside without specifically violating them. Giving control of your military to another body, which you just happened to control, was about as transparent as a lawyer's promise, but nevertheless legal. Not that anybody cared anymore, but the whole of politics is to find a way to legalize your particular crime. Politicians have different priorities from real people.

That the government of South Mexico had collapsed six months later was only a coincidence: So I'm told. It takes longer than six months to deliberately topple a government. If it can be toppled in six months, it was already on its way out anyway. For the protection of the, people, the Authority annexed the territory and . : . here we were, picking up the pieces of a project that somebody else had started.

And in the meantime, the Brazilians weren't speaking to us. They'd come around, eventually, but who knew how long that would take?

Abruptly, the smell got worse. I wouldn't have believed it possible.

They say you get used to even the worst smells. Not true. What happens is that your olfactory nerves shrivel into insensibility, refusing to come out again for two years afterward, not even when tempted with the most alluring scents of all: steak, buttered potatoes, chocolate ice cream, hot fudge, fresh strawberries, new car smells, fresh money-nothing.

This smell, the new one, lay across the previous stench like chocolate icing on a skunk. Neither smell was happy about it. The truly awful thing was that I recognized the smell.

The screen in front of me showed our location on the contour-delineated terrain. The depth was deliberately exaggerated to compensate for the limitations of human senses. I touched a button and noted for the mission log that we had encountered olfactory evidence of a fumble of gorps, also called gorths, gnorths, and glorbs, depending on who you were talking to. The military designation was ghoul.

This was a very bad sign.

Gorps or ghouls were scavengers, garbage-eaters, carrionfeeders. Fully mature, they stood three to four meters tall. A gorp was a sloth-shaped tower of hair. It had a barrel chest, a flexible prognathous snout, numerous small nasty eyes, and an attitude almost as bad as its smell. Its coat was a filth-ridden, flea-infested, rust-colored, dirty mass of coarse stringy hair and age-hardened mats. Its arms were disturbingly long, and the things it used for hands and feet were immense. Gorps were Chtorran bag ladies.

They ranged in color from startling orange to glow-in-the-dark brown. Sometimes they shambled along in a vaguely upright stance; most of the time they lumbered on all fours. Because they moved in slow motion, like koala bears, some people made the mistake of thinking they were gentle beings. It was not a mistake that anyone had lived long enough to make twice. Gorps were about as gentle as rhinoceroses. Think of a gorp as a giant, rabid, psychopathic, mutated, hydrocephalic orangutan with the mother of all hangovers-and you were working in the right direction. But this was a complimentary description; on a bad day, a gorp looked even worse.

It wasn't simply that a gorp could do you physical harm; it could, and it would, if you annoyed it long enough; no, the real horror was that its bouquet alone could raise blisters on a boulder. What a concentrated dose would do to human lungs was presumed fatal.

A gorp knew only two words: "Gorp?" and "Gorth!" The former was a questioning gulping sound, halfway between a yawn and a bark. The latter was a low-pitched rumble, which was generally interpreted as a warning growl.

Gorps were the biggest slobs in the Chtorran ecology. They damaged everything they came near. After a fumble of gorps wandered through a neighborhood, it looked like the aftermath of a blood feud between tornadoes. It wasn't malicious; they weren't angry creatures; it was simply the naked curiosity of a hungry scavenger raised to a new low. Even those few things that gorps occasionally left undamaged behind them carried their incredible reek for weeks afterward.

Gorps were always a bad sign. They weren't particularly wicked by themselves, and they were easy enough to avoid; their far-reaching smell usually gave enough advance warning that you could move to another state before they arrived in your neighborhood. Even if you weren't that smart, their lack of speed made it easy for you to keep out of their way; anyone who got caught by a gorp did it deliberately.

But the presence of gorps almost always meant that there was either a major infestation of worms nearby-or a grove of shambler trees. Probably shamblers. Even though Gorps preferred to live on the garbage of the worms, it was safer to trail the shamblers and feed upon the leavings of their tenants. Their appetites were ghoulish; hence the military designation.

My headset beeped abruptly-"McCarthy here," I answered.

"What is it, Captain?" The voice was Major Bellus. Major Robert E. Bellus, officially just an observer. Unofficially, I didn't know; but I had my suspicions. I'd met him only three days earlier. He was riding in the rear tank. The comfortable one.

"It's nothing, sir."

"But the smell-?"

"Gorps-or gorths. Or ghouls. But they could be miles from here. They might be rutting. We know that there are certain times when their stench gets strong enough to be detectable a hundred klicks away. The skyballs don't show anything within a radius of five, but their visibility is down due to the haze."

"Go to the satellite view and scan-"

"I already have, sir," I said patiently. "There are no mandalas in this sector. No clusters of huts, no single huts. No evidence of worms at,all. We're smelling either a migratory fumble of gorps, which I doubt, or they're following a grove of shamblers, which I consider much more likely. The skyballs are scanning for the herd now. Sir." I added.

Bellus paused.

I knew what he was thinking. Three days ago he'd abruptly taken control of this mission with the reassuring words, "I'm only here as an observer, you understand?" I understood. He was taking control. My job was to make him look good. Now he was considering whether or not to slap me down for being insubordinate or compliment me on doing my job.

"Very well. Carry on," he said sourly.

Right.

Prior to our coming through with rollagons and tanks, we had sent thirty-six spiders and over a hundred skyballs through this area. Neither worms nor humans had been seen here as recently as three days ago. There were some broken roads to be found, and the occasional abandoned ruin, but there was no evidence of any postdefoliation survival.

The military spiders were now programmed to burn worms automatically, as well as any humans in officially designated renegade-controlled areas, but they weren't yet programmed to target shamblers. The software couldn't make all the necessary discriminations yet, and Oakland was still playing it safe.

Unfortunately, the shamblers were turning out to be almost as dangerous as worms and renegades. They were tall and ficuslike, with interwoven columnar trunks; where the trunks split, the limbs stretched upward into tangles of thick ropy branches and dark snakey looking vines; but the shamblers were always blanketed with symbiotic partners, so no two individuals ever looked the same. Some were tall and dark, burnished with large shiny leaves and gauzy lacelike nets; others were slender and bony, but fluffed out with cottony pink tufts of nascent flowering; and still others were horticultural ragamuffins, a patchwork of colors, dripping down off the towering growth like a shower of banners and veils.

By themselves, the shamblers would have been obvious. But the landscape they wandered through was no longer completely Terran; it was dotted here and there with clusters of tenacious infestation; red kudzu and mottled creeper vines, cold blue iceplant and cloying purple fungi, black vampire ivy and wandering wormberry, all of them spreading as rapidly as a nasty rumor. The way the Chtorran infestation rolled over everything-trees, buildings, signs, boulders, abandoned cars-everything looked the same, differing only in the height and breadth of the lump it made in the landscape. So how could you tell if any specific lump was a shambler-especially when a shambler could look like anything?

The only sure way was to wait for it to move.

That was the other problem with shamblers. They didn't stay put.

If you spotted a shambler or a grove of shamblers, you had to be prepared to take them down when you saw them. You couldn't note their location and come back later. Three hours later, a shambler could be a half klick away-in any direction. A day later, as much as two klicks. In rugged country like this, it made any kind of a search difficult, if not impossible.

It didn't matter anyway. Even if we could cleanse an area, sweeping through it totally and burning everything that moved or even looked like it was thinking of moving, a week later there would be at least a dozen more shamblers moving ponderously through the same sector.

Dr. Zymph had a theory that the shamblers were in the process of developing migratory circuits and that if we could tag them, we'd see the whole pattern. General Wainright, who was in charge of this district, didn't believe in allowing any Chtorran creatures a chance to establish a biological foothold, and certainly not the chance to develop a whole migratory circuit. Dr. Zymph and General Wainright had had some glorious arguments. I'd witnessed two of them before I'd learned to stay close to an exit.

The military was growing increasingly antagonistic to the science branch. And vice versa. The military wanted to slash and burn. The science teams wanted to study. Myself-I was getting very schizophrenic. I could see both sides of the argument. I was a scientific advisor attached to the military, except when I was a soldier sent out on a scientific mission.

I could also see something else that disturbed me.

Three years ago, everybody was terrified of the Chtonran infestation, everybody was looking for ways to stop it; the essential priority was the development of weapons that would destroy the worms. Every scientist I met was interested in containment and control.

Now… the "domain of consciousness" had shifted. The worms had become "incorporated into our perceptual environment"-we were accepting the fact that they were here,, and with that acceptance, we were losing our commitment to resist, and instead, talking about ways to survive the inevitable takeover. I didn't like the shift in thinking that kind of talk represented. Next would be talk about ways for humans to "cooperate with the Chtorran ecology."

I'd already seen once how that kind of "cooperation" worked. It wasn't something I wanted to see again.

Absentmindedly, I checked my pulse. I was getting tense. I forced myself to sit back in my seat and did a quick breathing exercise. One apple pie with ice cream. Two banana splits with chocolate fudge. Three coconut cakes with pineapple topping. Four date-nut shakes with walnut flakes. Five-what goes good with e? Elephants. Five elephant burgers with rhinoceros relish… Six fragrant ferret farts. Seven great galloping garbage dumps. Eight horrible heaps of-never mind.

We rode deeper into the smell. Air-conditioning didn't help; it just made the smell colder. Oxygen hoods didn't help; they just enclosed you in a concentrated bag of it. Air fresheners didn't work; they just laid a new scent on top of the old one; the resulting mix was-incredible as it seemed-even worse than before. Someday, somebody was going to win a Nobel prize for inventing an olfactory science that could explain this mucus-blistering assault. That is, if anybody survived to hand out the prizes.

The worst part was that you didn't get used to it.

Now we were starting to see big purple patches of wormplant spreading across the crumpled slopes of the hills. They were fat with bright red wormberries, clustered in thick juicy-looking globules. They were edible, just barely-tart and sweet and sour all at the same time, kind of like cherries with sauerkraut; definitely an acquired taste. Unfortunately, the berries also carried the eggs of the stingfly. When they hatched in your belly-it had something to do with the exposure to stomach acids-the result would be a very uncomfortable case of maggots on the stomach.

The stingfly larvae clutched the stomach lining with very strong pincers or mandibles while they fed and grew. When they were large enough they'd let go, pass through the lower intestinal tract, cocoon themselves upon being exposed to air, and after a month or twelve, depending on the season, would hatch into a nasty little mosquito-like parent, ready to lay more eggs in the next patch of ripe worrnberries. Meanwhile, the wounds the maggots left in your stomach would very likely fester into ulcers. You could die from these ulcers; many already had. It was a slower and more painful death than being eaten by a full-size Chtorran, but every bit as effective. If I had my druthers, I'd druther be eaten by only one worm at a time, and not from the inside.

Meanwhile, there were agri-techs who were working on ways to make wormberries safe for human consumption; they were a great source of vitamin C and easier to cultivate than citrus trees. There were whole new industries being born in the wake of the Chtorran infestation. The Japanese had even found a way to make sushi out of the Chton-an gastropede-I'd heard it was as tasty as octopus, only a lot more chewy. They had also found that Chtorran oil was a superior substitute for whale oil; unfortunately there weren't enough Japanese to drive the Chtorrans into extinction as fast as they had done the cetaceans.

In the meantime, I wouldn't want to go walking across these hills in anything less than a tank. There would be millipedes in the underbrush; this time of year, they'd be feeding on the wormberries. They were attracted by the smell. I'd discovered that the hard way, five years ago at Camp Alpha Bravo in the Rocky Mountains. Apparently, the millipedes didn't mind a chronic case of maggots on the stomach-or maybe, considering the power of a millipede's stomach acids, the maggots didn't stand a chance. Who knew? There were too many questions that needed to be answered and not enough scientists.

Wherever there was a break in the sprawling wormplant cover, I could see the overall barrenness of the ground; but already, here and there, the first spidery patches of pink and blue iceplants were beginning to establish themselves. They were rootless wonders, feeding on anything they could, garbage, other plants, even industrial waste; whatever they happened to sprawl across. They lay flat against the ground, creeping in around the edges of thicker growths, scabrous and ugly webs of mottled ground.

Occasionally, Chtorran plants formed partnerships with the iceplant, but most ignored it as if it weren't there. Terran plants succumbed. Where the iceplant found a foothold, it grew and flourished, eventually becoming a fleshy mass of blue fingery tentacles. Where it couldn't flourish, it died-sort of.

Iceplants didn't just die-they shriveled and dried and flaked and blew away. Wherever a flake landed and found a profitable place to feed, a new iceplant began; it would survive until it too died and flaked away. You could burn the stuff away, but it always came back sooner or later.

The really bad news was that it was also a powerful hallucinogenic. Oh, hell, the entire Chtorran ecology was hallucinogenic. It was the stuff of which nightmares are made.

We rolled up and down, around and over. Mostly we tried to stay to the crests of the ridges; occasionally we dipped between them. Here the kudzu filled the darker hollows between the hills-filled and overflowed like a tide of blood. In some places, the scarlet ivy was already creeping toward the tops. Soon it would be a terrible glossy carpet, sprawling across everything, a bright stifling blanket, a plague of color and death.

The kudzu was the worst kind of enemy. You couldn't blow it up. Each fragment would try to reroot itself. You couldn't burn it out, because its roots would still survive. You couldn't poison its roots without doing more damage to the environment. General Armstrong H. Wainright would probably want to nuke it to hell and be done with it.

Suddenly: "Something up ahead-"

I punched the keyboard in front of me. My screens lit up to show the view from the aerial probes. The images bobbed and weaved. Three sweeps of spiders had been through this area, but hadn't reported any contacts.

"There it is."

The probes began to circle it slowly. It was unmistakable. "Be damned. I ain't never seen a dead one before."

"Is that a worm, sir?"

"It was," I answered. "Just a baby."

"That's a baby! Shit-I used to drive a truck smaller than that."

"Everybody shut up. Smitty, do the probes show anything else?"

"No, sir."

"Is there any network coverage?"

"Sorry. This area hasn't been seeded with remotes yet."

"All right. Pull up close. Lopez, you and your team take samples. Use the remotes. I don't want anyone stepping outside unless they have to."

The worm had been as thick as a van and twice as long. The body was chewed and still oozing a syrupy black ichor. It had been attacked quite recently, and whatever had done this had been hungry. Only half of it remained.

"What do you think killed it, sir?"

I shrugged. "Something bigger and meaner."

"An Italian grandmother," put in Marano, the rear gunner.

I responded to that with a noncommittal grunt. "The only thing I ever saw tangle with a worm willingly was a full-grown grizzly bear, and the result was a pretty cross bear. You never heard such fancy cussin' in your life." I peered curiously at the screen, while I added, "The bear walked away with ruffled dignity, and the Chtorran was thoroughly confused. Food isn't supposed to fight back. Of course, it was a very small worm and a very large bear." Abruptly puzzled, I tapped the keyboard in front of me. "Smitty, are these colors accurate?"

"Yes, sir. Why?"

"The stripes. Some of them look white. I've never seen white stripes on a worm before. Lopez, try to get some of the white quills, if you can."

My headset beeped. "Captain?" It was Major Bellus again.

"Sir?"

"McCarthy, why are we stopped?" He sounded like he'd just been awakened.

"We found a specimen."

"Something new?"

"A dead worm. We're taking samples."

"Oh?" he said. His tone revealed his annoyance.

"It's important, sir. Something killed this worm and it wasn't us."

"It's your mission, Captain. I'm just here to learn."

"Yes, sir. Any other questions?"

"No. I'm sure you'll keep me briefed."

"Yes, sir." I clicked off. Bellus didn't like me, hadn't liked me since the moment he'd failed to return my first salute.

As far as I knew, nobody had ever found a dead worm before. We could kill them, but not like this. Humans turned worms into blackened rubbery lumps, charred and smoking. This reeking mess was a bad omen. What fed on worms? Nothing that I'd ever heard of. This kind of puzzle had nasty teeth in it. You could ignore it, drive on by, and ten minutes later something would come charging up behind you and bite you in the ass. Considering the size of the bites, I didn't want to take the risk.

"Lopez, you done?"

"Just finishing now, sir. We're bringing the units home."

"Smitty? Anything on the screens?"

"No, sir."

"Okay, pop the hatch. I'm going to take a quick look around."

Close up, the worm smelled as bad as it looked-and in the flesh, it looked a lot worse than on the screens. Worms didn't usually stink like this. Normally, they had a soft, red, minty flavor, almost pleasant. This was the same smell turned putrid. An olfactory nightmare. This worm looked like it hadn't just been eaten, it looked like it had been jellied. I thought about spiders, nature's perfect little vampires; they injected the victim with enzymes that both paralyzed and liquefied, they waited until the critter's internals turned to custard, then they sucked it out. Nasty and efficient. I wondered if something had done the same thing to this worm.

It couldn't have been a spider, Chtorran or otherwise. The only spiders big enough for this kind of prey were the ones McDonnell Douglas had built for the North American Authority-and they didn't bite. They flamed. There were fifty of them patrolling the northern territory of the now-reunited Mexico; if any of them had run into anything unusual, it would have signaled.

The size of the bites puzzled me. A large predator would have ripped off strips of flesh. These bites were disproportionately neat and clear, as if someone or something had applied a grinder directly to the surface of the worm and just chewed it away. Whatever it was, it had only wanted access to the soft rubbery inside of the worm; once the holes had been opened, it left a lot of the skin intact.

Whatever it was, it was gone now. There were only stingflies and carrion bees feeding here. The sound of their incessant droning had a grating edge. The air hummed annoyingly. I knew they couldn't get under the hood of my jumpsuit, but just knowing they were out there made me feel naked and uncomfortable.

Abruptly, part of the puzzle clicked. The carrion bees. I glanced around quickly, then headed back to the rollagon at a run. "Seal the hatch," I ordered before I was even halfway in. It popped shut behind me so fast, it slapped me in the back.

"What was it? What'd you see?" Smitty asked nervously.

"Nothing. If I'd seen anything, it would have been too late."

"You know what did this, don't you?"

I shook my head. "No. Not specifically; but if I had to guess-" I pulled my hood off so I could splash my face with water from my canteen: "Those weren't big bites, they were little ones. Hundreds of thousands of little ones. That worm got hit by a swarm of something; it attacked, it fed, and…" I shrugged. "Now it's probably gone back to its nest-or whatever."

Lopez looked up from the screen of her microscope. "A swarm of something-?"

"Maybe it's something that we've seen before. We just haven't seen it do this." I was already dictating to the computer. "Check for all creatures that eat like spiders, things that poison their victims and liquefy their insides. It doesn't have to be big. We're looking for an effect that would be magnified if the creature fed in a swarm-but maybe it doesn't swarm all the time. Also consider nonswarming creatures that periodically come together." Abruptly, I had another thought. "Is it possible that a millipede swarm could overpower a worm?" I had to smile at that. It would be poetic justice. The worms ate millipedes like popcorn.

A cross-match on the juices found in the tissue samples would probably tell us what we needed to know. The tank's lab wasn't exhaustive, but Lopez was good. She'd made accurate determinations with samples of much worse quality.

"Sir?" That was Smitty. "Do we go on?"

"Huh-? Oh, of course." And then I realized what he was asking. "I don't think General Tirelli would be very happy with us if we turned around just because we saw a dead worm."

"It's not the worm I'm worried about, Captain. Check your screen please."

I tapped the keyboard in front of me, resetting the large screen in the center back to general surveillance. A giant pink fluffball the size of a Saint Bernard floated and bounced and rolled across the broken land in front of us.

Right, Fluffball day. When all the spores exploded at once, it would trigger a three-day feeding frenzy.

The eggs of all the things that fed on the spores would hatch at the same time. And then the eggs of all the creepy crawlies that fed on them. And then the eggs of all the larger creepy crawlies that fed on the little creepy crawlies would hatch, and so on, all the way up the food chain, until even the worms would come out and gorge themselves. I knew from personal experience that General Tirelli would understand this.

"Is there anything on the weather map? Satellite scan? Network? Probes? Skybirds?"

"No, sir."

"Maybe it's a rogue fluffball," I said. "Or maybe his calendar is off. Or maybe he's lonely and looking for friends, I dunno." I rubbed my cheek thoughtfully. I really hated decisions like this. I sighed with annoyance and double-checked the route map on screen two.

Right. We were headed into the reddest part of the map. I reached for my headset.