gardening
you did something stupid and now you're here in your itchy twice-a-year dress uniform in this bright busy room in the regimental HQ trying to figure out if you're going to be yelled at, shot, or promoted. the room's full of folding chairs. apparently not enough furniture in here normally to contain all the suits and all the brass.
your "ops coordinator" ("we don't say 'handler', grunt, it gives the civilians weird ideas") got pulled off for a side conversation two minutes after you got here and you haven't seen her since. you're looking anywhere for a familiar face. you're coming up empty. at least the woman next to you looks equally stressed. she must be civvie, some consultant or other; soft face, masses of curly hair. she's wearing a blazer and slacks with big round dataframes.
"hey," you elbow her. "what are you in for?"
"gods above and below." she sighs. "everything. but today mostly Neryx-9."
"the ag research station. you were there?"
"hardly," she says. "just came up on my huge list of problems."
"creepy shit. i was front and center for it…"
she cocks her head to listen. you explain.
Neryx-9 had been a cluster of greenhouses on the surface. supposed to be vacant, powered down — actually they'd said "mothballed", then looked at you like you were stupid when you asked what a moth was and what they did with their balls. but not vacant. far from it. you went in with a miniframe. first thing you found was the bodies of the grid authority techs that had called it in. purple mold already growing over them.
"it was wrong," you tell her. "not like that white stuff you get when an open nutripak sits in the fridge too long. i mean, i don't know if that would have been better. i just, i don't know, i didn't want to get any of that stuff on me. frame or no. maybe there was some already on me, but didn't want to get it on anyone else. so i backed out, sat in the airlock, thought about calling for extraction. thought better. backed to the wall, cycled my flight jets until it was starting to get warm even inside the frame, thought maybe i'd cook it off me. my ha– ops coordinator asked me what the fuck i was doing. snapped me out of it, i told her, i need fire. incendiaries."
they'd found them, somewhere. support rigged another airlock outside of the main airlock after you'd yelled at them to keep that shit inside. a miniframe-scale plasma cutter for outside construction work, and some purpose-built low-velocity liquid pyrophoric agent rockets.
the woman in the blazer made a face. "we just have those sitting around?"
"starship boarding actions. when we don't want to breach the hull but we do want to use all the oxygen. splashes around, gets everywhere, but nowhere near hot enough to melt anything structural. only used 'em in sims, of course, not like we get a lot of star traffic. horrorshow shit. or i thought it was, before this."
the outside airlock door opened and you'd taken up what they'd brought you.
you stepped over the bodies of the grid techs into hell. purple and orange jungle everywhere. insane external humidity and particle count. dome after hallway after dome of the shit, growing over the grow lights, growing up the walls, into the vents. you could feel it through your frame, through your suit. it was hungry. it wanted in.
"ma'am, compared to that feeling, that pressure, the first giant critter trying to eat my frame was a relief."
six thick legs, triangular jaws, scales and plates all over, massive paddle tail. it had reared out of a pond and tried to drag you back in with it. it wasn't as heavy as you, maybe, but it was mad as hell and a fast mover, and fuck, what right had anything like that to exist in an abandoned greenhouse? you knew you didn't want to be in that filthy water. who knew how deep it was? it'd clog your exhaust, choke your radiators. you twisted around as best you could in its grip, armed your wrist weapon, and blasted a thousand flechettes directly into its face.
"and that stopped it?"
"well, wasn't much left to be stopped, but yeah. and that's when i found it that it had friends and they could smell blood in the water."
she wrinkled her nose in a way that was either a dataframe input gesture or genuine surprise.
"why not just depressurize the domes, at this point?"
"thought about it. i had breaching charges. but… like i said, this stuff felt like it shouldn't get out. there's not much out there, yeah, but i just couldn't. and i had the cutter, and the rockets. so i decided to make it too hot on the shore for them to get me so easy."
you'd turned the artificial jungle into curtains of flame. the big creatures dove back into the water, giving you a narrow path to keep going. in the burning canopy, smaller things flared and dropped; you hadn't seen them moving until they died.
your handler had been screaming at you to get clear, get back to the airlock, but the flames made that a losing proposition. so you kept going in. Neryx-9 was roughly linear. there was another lock on the far side.
"past the labs, it turned out. and maybe some of those corpses in there had been growing these things, but it looked like the shit got away from them and was growing on them. there were these ribbons of orange moss, growing everywhere, out of containers, branching into foam and fabric and dead flesh — i tried to pull it off someone, before i realized they were all dead, and their skin came off in sheets, brown-black and full of tiny holes. charred, but not. think it was acid."
"something like a lichen."
"yeah, maybe? i learned about those in school. you can see 'em out the windows in a lot of places. they grow on rock, right?"
"they do," she says. "useful. so what did you do then?"
"i set the cutter to max spread and i torched a path through to the far airlock. and i don't mind saying, when i noticed the cutter battery and gas cylinder were doing okay, i started spreading it around a lot more. i just. i had to burn it."
"happens that was the right move," she said. "good instinct."
"please tell me someone did something about that shit."
"well," she smiled, "there's you. you know, you're refreshingly simple. like a cat that somehow had the sense to eat an invasive lizard. and since you didn't drag the bits all over, i tasked a solarsat to finish the job. can't beat a pass with an X-ray cloudpiercer beam for that kind of cleanup."
she wrinkles her nose again, and the general murmuring of a dozen conversations in the room changes as people look to the main wall display, which now shows a collection of greenhouse domes sagging as if collapsed by an invisible weight. the rock under them begins to glow.
"what's a cat?" you blurt out, before the words "i tasked a solarsat" have a chance to sink in. like, her, personally?
"an animal. a dumb little predator that associates with humans. from Terra, way before the Catastrophe. we're not ready for them just yet, but maybe someday."
a door opens to your side, and you both turn to see your handler, looking about at the end of her rope, and next to her, her boss, the major, who reports directly to the colonel.
"shit, there you are. look. you're gonna have to answer some questions. and it's not guaranteed you're going down for this, not yet, so just be honest, but for fuck's sake be brief, don't try to understand or interpret—"
both of their faces blanch. like, almost completely bloodless. eyes wide.
the curly-haired woman in the blazer smiles widely. "don't worry," she tells them, "she already did. she's been very helpful. in fact, i think i might like to keep her." she puts a hand on your knee.
"i'm not sure i understand, ma'am?"
"pilot," the major says, "is there a reason you've been occupying the time of the Director of Planetary Ecology? the woman who keeps this entire planet breathing oxygen and eating something other than rocks?"
and now your face must be bloodless too. the DPE? even you know that position. but you can't remember ever seeing a photo.
"oh, she was just telling me how she improvised containment protocols to prevent someone's experiment with Araukan imports from getting out of hand. clever girl. or lucky, at least."
you risk a glance to your side. she's still smiling. the woman who can steer any bioscience research on this planet, cut off power and water and air to anything she deems anathema to the coming ecosystem, commandeer keystone orbital infrastructure and burn habitats like you burned trees.
"i don't think we can possibly say no, Director," your handler says, carefully.
"no," the Director agrees. "you can't." □
#microfiction #mechPilot #mechposting
erin
Wintergreen