I had my slate out to review our evolving catalog of Chelicer xenofauna. Merrit was on his haunches, studying the shrapnel; Greffin had a link to base camp at the farms, going over inventory to see what we could repurpose. Around us and the wreckage stretched the local scrub. Sedentary life on Chelicer was either low and spiny or tall and thin with a sort of puffball arrangement at the top. The land — the world — was dry, the ecosystem impoverished and short on species. My unfinished xenobio report went long on the idea that Chelicer had been lush in the past, and we’d arrived to find what had stabilized out of a catastrophic dry spell, or maybe some serious solar flare activity. There were no great forests to give cover to alien tigers. On Chelicer nothing grew past a shrub. One meter for the spiny stuff, two for the puffball poles. And the weather station had been up on high ground, ten klicks’ visibility in any direction. We were safe.
The three of us had set the station up three days before and somehow it had riled the locals. Probably the sonic and radio chatter from using bounce-back to map meteorological systems. But nothing we’d seen on all of Chelicer 14d was big or aggressive enough to do this damage.
“This is coming out of the use-budget,” Greffin said mournfully. She worked in Resources, liaising with the orbiting Garveneer to get what we needed. And we’d already needed plenty to get ourselves set up planetside.
When we reached the weather station it was so comprehensively trashed you’d think it’d been dropped from orbit. Torn apart and the pieces stomped on, the edges corrugated with dents and corroded with fluids. Something on this planet really didn’t want us to know when it was going to rain.
Shouting at people works, when you’re not allowed time off to process death. Works remarkably well, if it’s the only outlet you’ve got. Just as well. There would be plenty of both shouting and death in everyone’s future.
“You want a sample?” I asked FenJuan. “For real? Cut your own out of this. You can be absolutely sure it doesn’t come from a Farmer.” And I pointed them at the leg, the one we’d shot off the big bouncing bastard.
Which was turning it back on me, making it my fault. And which wasn’t true to boot. I told them that if they were having difficulty distinguishing between samples maybe they didn’t have the basic analytical skills required for the task. The structures that they’d pegged as the local equivalent of a genome were probably just some essential organelle that every damn beastie possessed, and the real genome-equivalent had gone completely under FenJuan’s radar.
“When I say, ‘Get me a selection so I can run comparative studies,’” they snapped, “I do not mean just go snip bits off the Farmers and call the job done. A man is dead because we don’t understand the world here.”
And I’d given them samples previously. I’d cut a chunk out of a dozen critters on four other excursions and brought them back. And I’d just seen a work colleague turned to paste by some local monster-bug neither my nor FenJuan’s science had accounted for. But in the Concerns you don’t get time off for inefficient foibles like grief or trauma, so I made do with snarling at FenJuan that they’d had all the damn samples they were getting from me and if that wasn’t good enough then maybe they were the problem.
“My samples?” they said. Because they didn’t do fieldwork, just like they didn’t do basic human interaction, just sat at base camp and bitched.
... continue reading