Claws That Catch

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“We lost Sergeant Champion and Lance Corporal Rucker, KIA,” Eric reported tonelessly. “Corporal Shingleton was injured by a thorn and we’ve been unable to stop the bleeding. He needs to be evacuated to the base. There appears to be a final defensive point beyond the fungus. When Staff Sergeant Carr’s team attempted to approach from beyond the last crystal pillar, they took plasma fire. He stated that it was white in color, not green.”

“Nitch,” First Sergeant Powell said. “Maybe Mreee. Both of them use blasters and the plasma is white.”

“That was where we lost Rucker,” Carr said. “It tracked in on him. Right around the cover of the crystals.”

“Yeah, that’s one of those Mreee/Nitch blasters,” Powell said. “They’ll do that.”

“We couldn’t even get a good look at who was firing,” Carr said. “There’s a bunch of spread-fungus down there, too. I’d rather not get into that if we can avoid it.”

“We need to clear this compartment, Staff Sergeant,” Bill said. “But I’ll admit we need something to clear the fungus so we can.” He thought about that for a second and then snapped his fingers, the claws of his suit trying to follow suit. “Miriam.”

“Miriam can clear the compartment?” Lieutenant Ross said, surprised. “How, sir?”

“Let’s get your wounded and KIA back to the camp, Lieutenant,” Bill said. “I need to talk to Miss Moon.”

“Well, of course, I brought some with me,” Miriam said. “I’m not done studying them. I’ll admit, this isn’t the best environment…”

The camp had been moved to one of the larger crystal caves and even the conversation of the camp tended to trigger the crystals. The whole area was lit by effulgent light from the glittering pillars.

“Well, here’s an experiment for you,” Bill said. “We can’t clear that forward compartment until we get rid of the fungus in the way; that stuff will infest a Wyvern suit like nobody’s business. Can your spiders clear it?”

“I’ve only got the two,” Miriam said. “But they’re parthenogenic. I don’t actually know what their rate of reproduction would be in an optimal environment…”

“Would an optimal environment be a pile of dead Dreen?” Bill asked. “We’ve got that.”

“I’m not sure,” Miriam said. “I’ve never been able to experiment with Class Four biologies. The best I can suggest is we can try.”

“It looks dead,” Eric said, examining the space spider through the glass of the box.

“I evacuated the air,” Miriam said. “They go into hibernation in vacuum.”

She twisted the valve on the inlet, letting air into the box, and the spider immediately began to move.

“Okay,” she said, opening it up and dropping the spider onto one of the dead dog-demons. “Here goes nothing.”

The arachnoid appeared to be surprised to be awake, spinning in place in confusion, then began wandering across the dead Dreen, its antenna waving. When it found the exit wound from the .50 caliber that had killed the Dreen it paused for a moment then dove into the hole.

“I wonder what it’s — ” Eric started to say, then there were crunching sounds from inside the Dreen. “Yuck.”

“Interesting,” Miriam said. “No reaction to the increased oxygen that I can determine.” She sat down with her back to the bulkhead and pulled out a lab book. “Time is… fourteen twenty-three. Now to see what happens…”

“That didn’t take long,” Eric said, trying not to retch as small arachnoids streamed out of the collapsing carcass of the Dreen. It had been less than two hours and starting with one of the space spiders the dog-demon was now almost totally consumed.

“Their rate of propagation in the presence of food resources from a Class Four biology is amazing,” Miriam said. “Can you grab a couple of them so I can observe rate of growth? I’d love to get a count on them but I think that’s going to be hard. Two thousand, you think?”

“I cannot listen to that anymore!” Sergeant Bae screamed, his Wyvern’s claws up against his sensor pod. “Okay, external audio is off!”

“That shouldn’t happen to… a Dreen,” Eakins said, turning his sensors away from the pile of Dreen bodies.

When the wave of arachnoids from the first dead dog-demon hit the pile of Dreen by the entrance, they exploded, reproducing in enormous numbers. It had taken two hours to reduce the first Dreen to bones. It took about the same to do it to a hundred.

“They’re moving,” Staff Sergeant Carr said.

The, by then, hundreds of thousands of spiders had moved into the compartment, spreading out in a quest for more sustenance. They found it first in the scattered bodies of thorn-throwers, but that satiated them for barely five minutes. Then they hit the fungus.

“Now that’s…”

“…A hell of a thing,” Berg said. He had used the cover of the pillars to move forward where he could observe the effect of the spiders on the Dreen fungus. Miriam had wanted to do it, but he’d forced her to wait in the corridor and monitor his video.

The spiders weren’t having it all their own way. He saw dozens, hundreds, of them being captured by pseudopods thrown out by the fungus. The same thing had happened to humans during the Dreen war and even after. It had especially happened to the armies and mujahideen militias in the Middle East who had thrown themselves into the Dreen “crusaders” much as the arachnoids were doing.

But this was a small patch of fungus and a lot of spiders. While one might get captured by the fungus, a dozen other of the creatures swarmed over the pseudopod, eating it as fast as it could digest its captured prey. Sometimes captured spiders even survived, breaking out to attack the fungus in their own turn. Some were partially absorbed, leaving shredded corpses behind. Perhaps the fungus gained some sustenance from them, but it was being eaten too fast to do anything with it.

As Eric watched, one of the most dreaded things in the galaxy shriveled and fell to the cute little spiders, who munched their way across, unheeding of losses, chewing it up, reproducing even as they moved, leaving little spiders behind which caught at the shreds, moved onward…

“Thirty-two minutes to ingest one hundred and sixty-four square meters of spread-fungus,” Miriam said. “Not bad. Full time to clear the compartment, from one spider, was approximately four hours forty-nine minutes. Lieutenant Bergstresser, your compartment is now clear of fungus as far as I can see.”

“Right,” Berg said. “Gunny Juda, move teams forward by fire and maneuver to clear the compartment of remaining threats…”

“Sir, this is Bae! You need to see this, sir!”

“This” was a Nitch, a much larger arachnoid than the ones that had cleared the compartment, standing nearly eight feet at the shoulders. The Nitch were one of two Dreen slave races the humans had encountered in the Dreen War, the other being the felinoid Mreee. While the Mreee were a relatively recent addition to the Dreen empire, having been conquered within the lifetime of one of the survivors of the war, the Nitch had been slaves since time immemorial.

The spiderlike Nitch had silvery bodies that reflected oddly in any sort of complex background and actually acted as natural camouflage. But this one was easy enough to see, rolled onto its back, its blaster lying more then ten feet away as if tossed and its legs pulled up in contortions. It was also, quite clearly, dead.

“What’s this?” Bae asked, squatting down next to the giant spider. “It’s leaking fluid from holes on its sides.”

“It was the sentient controller,” Berg said, staying well back. He did not particularly like spiders and Nitch gave him the willies. The space spiders were just different enough from true spider forms he found them okay, but Nitch… “They’re generally hooked into the fungus through tubes that feed them and I guess that they use to control the rest of the Dreen. If there was Dreen stuff in them…”

A juvenile space spider fell out through one of the holes, walked a few feet and then stopped, its legs pulling in and its carapace wrapping around it in hibernation mode.

This end of the compartment was littered with the hibernating space spiders, so many that it was impossible not to step on them. With the food supply exhausted, they’d apparently shut down in hopes that something would turn up. Space spiders appeared to be nothing if not patient.

“Well, let’s get him back to base,” Eric said, turning to leave and treading on another of the spider bodies. “And we’ll need to get the compartment swept up. I figure Captain Weaver will be up here with his guitar in about…”

“We got a way to get these things cleaned up, Lieutenant?” Weaver asked, walking up, guitar in hand. “I’m afraid the crunching will interfere with the acoustics…”

“We must watch the Tree closely for any change,” Colonel Che-chee said over the comm. Nine of the dragonflies were parked outside the field of the Tree, hiding in its shade, while the tenth was waiting by the space dock. “In the event we observe any change, Cha-shah will immediately enter the space dock and report. My chronometer says that Captain Weaver will be starting at any time. Observe closely, males! Any change in the light patterns, even the slightest! Any change in the particle emiss… Oh My GOD!”

“CAPTAIN WEAVER!” the communicator screamed. “Colonel Che-chee requests that you cease playing immediately!”

“Why?” Weaver bellowed. “Anna Gadda Da Vida… !”

“Sir… sir…” the communications tech stuttered. “JUST STOP!”

“That’s a hell of a thing,” Weaver said, watching the video from Colonel Che-chee’s helmet camera.

On the dot of the time-stamp of his starting to play, the entire Tree jumped about five times in luminosity. But that wasn’t the really strange part. It began collapsing upwards, the base expanding in size at the same time, the higher points sliding in line with lower and stretching out. He’d stopped before the full transformation could take effect.

“And there was no apparent effect from inside?” Bill asked. “I was up front, so the change never got to me.”

“Not that anyone could tell, sir,” Captain Zanella said. “Until we got the transmission from Colonel Che-chee, we had no idea there had been a change.”

“That’s not all, sir,” Figueredo said. The astronomy tech had been sent along to assist in investigations. While the exploration of the interior of the Tree had been uninteresting, the readings that he got from the Cheerick suits… “Admittedly, they were shielded by the Tree. But there was a sharp change in stellar emissions. They actually dropped.”

“Run that one by me again,” Bill said. “Define.”

“Local heat output dropped by ten percent,” the astronomy tech replied. “Solar wind dropped by thirty percent. Cosmic ray scatter dropped by nine. Those are near orders, sir, but probably close to accurate. Whatever this thing was doing, it was affecting the star, sir.”

“Okay,” Bill said, looking at the Cheerick. “Colonel, I want you to refuel your dragonflies then move out to at least two AU and observe the effects. But not all of them. Send two males.”

“You think there may be hazard?” the colonel asked.

“I have no grapping clue, Colonel,” Bill admitted. “But I’d rather not lose the flight commander.”

“Freebird?” Weaver muttered to himself. “Too slow. “Smoke on the Water?” Too bass. “Jungle Love?” Too campy… Ah!”

He hummed to himself for a moment, then started slamming the guitar strings, his eyes closed and grooving to the music. When he finished the intro, he just had to open his mouth. The hell with these crystals and not liking his singing…

“When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town,” he screamed over the guitar, “Down around San Antone, And the folks are risin’ for another day… round about their homes…”

“Sir!” Eric shouted. “Sir! Open your eyes!”

Weaver looked up and the guitar twanged a loud, flat C chord as it slid to a stop. Because he could see what he was doing.

He couldn’t see what was happening to the Tree, but he could see the effects. The walls of the room had become transparent and all four of the Jovians were in view. Something was causing the massive planets to fluoresce in different colors. The only thing that would do that, Weaver knew, was massive energy input. Offhand, the amount of joules just wouldn’t register. Actually, for a moment they did, then his brain locked up trying to count the zeros. Pretty close to the total output of Earth’s sun was the best he could figure. For each Jovian. The energetic gas was flashing in all the colors of the rainbow and as the Jovians moved it streamed out behind.

“Don’t stop!” Eric shouted again. “It’s just started!”

Weaver caught up the melody again, grooving on the music and playing for all he was worth. But this time he kept his eyes open. This show was just too good to miss.

“Well, the secret of the Tum-Tum Tree is finally explained,” Captain Zanella said, shaking his head.

“It’s a concert venue,” Weaver finished, grinning. “It’s a grapping interstellar concert venue.”

While Weaver was playing in the control compartment, the wall of the compartment the camp had been moved to became transparent as well. As the Tree spun on its axis, the Jovians could be seen fluorescing while the music was transmitted to the entire crew. After a few minutes of playing, the “beams” that the Tree was shooting out began collecting the gases, drawing them towards the Tree and fluorescing them along their entire length. The whole solar system was lit up with cascading waves of lambent color, reds, blues, greens, purples, every color of the rainbow as the gases reacted to the massive power of the Tum-Tum Tree and formed a huge spiral of shining, rippling light.

“Apparently an open one, too,” Miriam said. “The caves are now explained. Besides being sort of stellar sky-boxes, they’re rooms for bands getting ready to play to warm up. And they have automatic visual feedback if you’re not up to par. No offense, Captain.”

“None taken,” Bill said dryly. “I think the main venue must have filtered out the vocal component.”

“It is even more remarkable from space,” Colonel Che-chee said. “But we nearly lost a dragonfly. Cha-shah came close to one of the beams and reported that if it had not been for his shield he would now be dead. And he was not even in the beam itself, more than a hundred meters away.”

The video shots from the dragonflies showed that the tree opened up into a hemisphere, stretching somehow to engulf the upper tenth of the star then entirely wrapping it in some sort of absorption field. The incredibly hot, bright, star faded to insignificance, becoming almost black, keeping the light from the star from overwelming the show and feeding the masses of raw power into the beams that created it.

If anything, the most spectacular sight was the Tum-Tum Tree, which must have been using a good quarter of the star’s energy itself. It blazed along with the music, visible only from space. But from the right place it would be magnificent.

“Time to full warm up was right at nine minutes,” Figueredo said. “At that point, stellar output was less than three percent of normal and the power of the beams was blasting the Jovians so hard they’ve probably lost a good ten percent of their mass.”

“Yeah, but it’s gas,” Weaver pointed out. “Most of it remained in the orbits. They’ll collect it back over time. When this thing was in full use, though, I wonder how they kept them supplied?”

“With these guys, sir, who knows, sir?” Figueredo said. “They could have teleported it through gates from other Jovians. Especially if they could expand the size of the gates.”

“Planet-sized gates?” Bill mused. “Heck, just set up a gate to move a smaller Jovian. Put one gate in the way of the incoming Jovian and the other by the one you’re refueling.”

“That is scary,” Miriam said. “That’s… too big.”

“These guys used the full output of a blue-white star, twenty thousand times the power of Sol, as a laser-light show,” Bill pointed out. “Throwing around Jovians would be comparatively trivial.”

“The males did report something that troubles me,” Colonel Che-chee said, her nose twitching. “They say that they could hear the music. Not over the radio, mind you. They could hear it as if they were present. They, in fact, complained about how loud it was.”

“Impossible, Colonel,” Captain Zanella said. “Noise does not propagate through vacuum, no matter how loud it is.”

“I told them this,” the colonel said. “They still insist that they heard the music.”

“Was it in time with the pulsing of the planets?” Bill asked.

“I believe they said it was,” the colonel replied.

“There’s a way that you could do it,” Weaver said musingly. “If you knew the make-up of the receiving ship, or suit in this case, you could tune a gravitational beam to cause harmonics in the receiving ship. But, my God, the computational requirements! You’d have to figure for light-speed lag, the materials you were encountering, location of the target referential to the Jovians and the Tree…” He shook his head in wonder. “And all this for an entertainment device?!”

“You know, in about eight years this star’s going to start blinking from the standpoint of the nearest G class star,” Bill said, watching as Red moved out of place and Gants stepped up. The Tree would hold in “playing” position for up to fifteen minutes, apparently to let bands change places. And it reacted to any music, even badly sung or played. It was best with better quality and reacted the most effectively to pure sonic mass, the more decibels the more the planets fluoresced. But it would even cause some reaction from a badly sung nursery tune, as Captain Zanella had demonstrated to everyone’s dismay.

“Since there are ruins there, you have to figure that the race that built this thing had this star blinking on and off all the time,” Bill continued. “You can just see it: Those damned kids are at it again!” He looked less excited than he sounded.

“I’m glad we found this,” Miriam replied softly. “It’s nice to find that at least one race could pour this much effort into something of beauty, that has no other use than to bring joy.” She looked at him for a moment and then snorted. “Penny and some dehydrated fruit for your thoughts?” she added, holding out a bag of dehydrated apples.

“Is it that obvious?” Bill asked.

“Not to get too Star Trekkish,” Miriam said. “But I’m also an empath. To me, yeah.”

“I’m wondering whether I’m doing the right thing,” he said, shrugging. “This is more my cup of tea than personnel records or wheedling clerks. Yes, I chose to be a Naval officer but I’m a scientist at heart. Astro was fun, exciting, challenging in a way that I found… useful and interesting. XO…”

“Sucks,” Miriam said.

“In a nutshell,” he replied. “And God only knows how long I’m gonna be stuck as one.”

“And you don’t get along with Captain Prael,” Miriam said. “Not that I blame you.”

“We’re getting along better,” he said. “But I’ll admit I’ve been comforting myself with the thought: ‘He’s not going to be here long.’ That said, what do I get next? Somebody more like Spectre? More like Prael? Worse?”

“What are you going to do?” Miriam asked.

“I’m not good at turning down a challenge,” Bill said. “And I’ve gotten better at the paperwork. It’s not the sort of paperwork I prefer, and I think it’s really limiting my scope, but I’m getting better at it. Being XO has taught me stuff. And if I’m ever going to command the Blade, it’s stuff I need to know.”

“You want to command the Blade?” Miriam asked.

“Oh, hell,” Bill said, snorting. “I want to own the Blade. I want to go off looking at what I want to look at. But the closest I’ll ever come is commanding it. So, yes. And to do that, I need to be XO. No matter how much it sucks.”

“So you’re not going to bunk off to something else?” Miriam asked.

“Nope. I’ll stick it as long as it takes for the Navy to trust me to command.”

“Good,” Miriam said. “In that case, I’ll stick around too.”

“I wonder what Gants is going to sing?”

“No idea,” Miriam said. “But it couldn’t be worse than Captain Zanella’s rendition of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ ”

Sub Dude stepped into the middle of the crystals and cleared his throat. Sticking his right hand into his blouse, he straightened from his habitual slouch, opened his mouth and proceeded to “sing”:

“Okay,” Miriam said, laughing so hard tears were coming out of her eyes, “I was wrong.”