Weaponized

1

Present

‘No sign of the bastards,’ said Callum, as they stood looking at the screen. It gave one of the last remaining views out across their ruined fields and exterior facilities, towards the dusty flats and rocky slabs of the Bled – the desert areas of Threpsis. Callum, Ursula noted, had begun fiddling with his bracelet. They itched underneath sometimes, but had bonded to the skin so the itch was impossible to scratch.

She looked down at her own – the devices were to initiate their ‘new upgrade’. Hers seemed to have sunk into her wrist a little way, just as it had on the first recipient of one – the biologist Nursum. Around it the skin had the scaly, hard crystalline look she’d seen on him. Yet when she pressed a finger into the skin, it felt as soft as before, though maybe a little rough.

Ursula shrugged. ‘They’re smart, they’re waiting and they know.’

Her certainty worried her. Sure, by their behaviour she had surmised that the cacoraptors, or simply raptors as they were now called, possessed intelligence, but her assurance went beyond that. It was almost as if she could feel them out there, their purpose and collective will. She shook her head. That made no sense, did it? She glanced at her bracelet again, remembering precisely what Oren had used in the upgrade. She shivered.

Callum glanced at her and said tiredly, ‘If that’s the case, according to the Polity proscription on colonization of worlds with sentient or pre-sentient life, we shouldn’t be here anyway.’ He snatched his hand away from his bracelet and shook himself. ‘But then, with the danger they represent, we shouldn’t be here, despite their intelligence.’

He suddenly didn’t look tired any more. It was probably a further sign of the upgrade’s effects. Ursula had been seeing subtle changes in those around her since they had all been given the bracelets – quicker movements and thought, fast recovery times, changes to their adaptations. Oren had told her that the changes were kicked off by surges of stress hormones, as had been the case with Nursum. The constant low-grade stress in here was almost acceptance.

She nodded. ‘I rather think the Polity has things other than colony regulations to occupy it right now.’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, when we came here we were breaking no laws. They weren’t intelligent then. It’s their most recent adaptation, of course – to get them to the plentiful food supply that we are.’

Callum grimaced then shook his head sharply, sending an iridescent ripple down his neck and across the metallic skin of his bare chest. ‘I’ll go and check on progress.’ He turned away and headed off through the armoured complex of their base.

Ursula watched him go, damning herself for the comment since one item of what she had so casually called ‘food supply’ had been Callum’s brother. They hadn’t been close – his brother working on agriculture before their last retreat – but they had stacked up many years, some together, some not. All in the colony, Callum included, were very old and experienced, expert in many disciplines and mature beyond ancient iterations of that state.

Ursula returned her attention to the view, but the screen went out. A raptor had found the camera, even though it’d been the size of a pinhead, and destroyed it. Again this was something she knew, just as she knew they were burrowing under the base to try and get around those areas the colonists had blocked off. Another frightening possibility was what preparations the raptors might be making outside, for they knew about the prador assault craft which had landed on this world, and that their prey would try to get to it – she was sure. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to get some sense of it. Shadows seemed to flicker around her for a second, and she could hear a distant chittering – similar to what they heard over the electromagnetic spectrum, the EMR – from the raptors. But when she turned her perception towards this it fled. Damn it, no. This had to be due to the strange physical and mental changes of the upgrade, tiredness and stress, and what seemed to be a steadily growing paranoia. Aural and visual hallucinations weren’t unexpected.

She sighed and stood up, weariness in her bones. This annoyed her because she had too much to do. After glancing down at her own bracelet again, she abruptly slapped her hands together hard and pushed. The weariness dissolved, as it had before, and she walked out of the viewing room and deeper into the colony’s base; more shadows seemed to flicker around her as armoured doors closed behind. In the corridor she paused to view repairs to a wall. A raptor borer had come through here, emitting an acid that turned ceramal armour as frangible as burned bone. It had destroyed two mosquito autoguns before the mobile weapons eventually drove it away. She considered what might have happened had there been people close by, and just what the ‘new upgrade’ might have turned them into, and she pondered on what new nightmares this world might have in store.

The survey of Threpsis had shown an Earth-like world, its gravity at 1.2, its temperature a little above that of Earth, so apparently good living conditions could be found in the north and south, except when killing summer temperatures arrived, while a band of desert around the equator would cook an unprotected human. A normal human. Standard humanity, or rather the antique kind, would have died here, if not from the temperature changes then from the solar radiation on a world with such a weak magnetosphere. But humans had ceased to be ‘normal’ some centuries ago.

Ursula and her people, when they’d arrived from the Polity Line world of Kalonan, had prepared themselves. Oren Salazar, whose multiple qualifications sat under the title ‘biophysicist’, had modified state-of-the-art nanosuites for them – the masses of nanomachines that served as internal doctors and complementary immune systems – far in advance of the usual ones in the Polity. These new suites could respond rapidly to changes in the environment – giving Callum his radiation-resistant skin, giving Ursula kidney and liver organelles throughout her body. Others had different adaptations. All were what her fellow colonist Annette had described as extremophiles, creatures adapting radically to their environment, before something more extreme here had eaten her.

But with this ‘new upgrade’ they’d been given something more.

She continued along the corridor to where it terminated against another armoured door, palmed the control beside it and walked out onto a gantry over the inner chamber. Their main car sat down below her, along with a small grav-car they had aboard it. The huge vehicle was three hundred feet long and ran on adaptive wheels. The last of their grav-motors were inside the thing, but only capable of lifting it for short hops before they drained the super-capacitors. Two of their base’s fusion reactors powered it and topped up the capacitors. These also supplied power for weapons and its new adaptive armour. They’d piled every last erg of power and every scrap of useful technology they could into this car, but it still might not be enough. It was their last chance to escape this place before the cacoraptors found some new way to penetrate. She gazed at the people working around it, her people. Three hundred and twenty of them remained out of the eight hundred who had originally come here. All of them had taken long strides away from standard humanity due to their special nanosuites and the pressures of staying alive here. And now they might be forced to go even further – anything to survive.

Ursula glanced at the bracelet again while remembering the first nightmarish retreat to base, their first encounter with a cacoraptor.

Near Past

Ursula gazed through her small armoured car’s chain-glass screen at the land ahead. Yellow surface roots, poisonous to many forms of life here, had first spread from seeds which later produced the blue cycads now occupying the churned-up ground. After days of work clearing and cultivating this land, the infestation had established in less than a day, and the cycads were already putting up flower spikes, like inverted bunches of grapes. She peered over at where many of the cycads had been shredded down to ground level, for now brontopods had arrived.

The colonists had taken the dozer across this twenty-five acres of land, tearing up plants that fought back with mobile vines, poisoned spines, stings that shot out like those of a jellyfish, and sprays of enzyme acid. One plant had even deployed its biological flamethrower, others had tried to retreat into the ground or move out of the dozer’s path. Even as the heavy machine had rumbled across, its ceramal armour smoking from acid and fire, other robots had trailed it on insect legs, selectively targeting any new shoots which appeared, hitting them with local toxins, laser, chemical flamer or ionic electrocution. Flying herbivores like pterodactyls, but with four wings and drill-like beaks which they used to suck the plant bodies dry, soon attacked the dozer-heaped debris. The dozer, after using its thermite jet to set an intense fire, fed that with oxygen until only a low heap of embered ash remained. They then sowed the field with further toxins in pre-paration for a crop of plants, adapted and genetically modified from local flora, they could actually eat, though poison for a ‘normal’ human of course. But they hadn’t been quick enough.

The seeds had swept down in a wind from the mountains. They hit the soil and germinated explosively to spread their poisonous yellow webs to kill any rival flora, slammed down roots that grew with the speed of snakes, and began sucking nutrients to grow the cycads she saw now. Ursula engaged drive and rumbled her car closer, hearing the sounds of things pinging against its armour. Spines landed on the screen and slid down its almost frictionless surface, trailing blue globules. The toxin component of the spines’ poison didn’t affect humans in the same way it did local herbivores, but it did cause a massive allergic reaction that could kill. Before that its enzyme component would have done the job anyway – eating through human flesh like nitric acid.

‘The dozer’s got its work cut out,’ said Chandar over radio from one of the other three cars accompanying her. ‘At least we’ll only need that and one toxin to kill this lot off.’

‘There is that,’ Ursula replied, ‘though it’ll be two days before Shaben layers new armour on the dozer.’ She paused contemplatively. ‘We need those brontopods gone. If they destroy enough cycads, other stuff will come in and we’ll be back where we started.’

‘Best we get on that, then,’ Chandar opined.

Ursula checked her satellite feed. Previously, the outer fence, electrified and armed with other intermittent deterrents, had been enough to keep the animals out. But it seemed the new bloom of cycads had been impossible to resist and, hooting and clattering in pain, the brontopods had trampled the fence and broken into colony lands. They had spread out through this bounty of plants that were, in terms of this world, quite a vulnerable food source. But now, infrared showed them all gathered in one place. Ursula drove her car towards them through the cycads, the other three following, spines pinging off them all. Back at base they would have to put the cars through a deactivating wash, and Shaben would have more armour work to do, since the new adaptive armour wasn’t ready yet.

Soon she could see them, the brontopods. These huge, heavily armoured herbivores walked on eight legs and sported heads with armoured shields, like those of a triceratops, and beaks that could shear through stone. They had joyfully tucked into the blue cycads while the spines bounced off their hides. Now, instead of steadily grazing, they had huddled with their head shields facing outwards. She checked heat signatures and saw something else moving between the cycads. The brontopods watched intensely, clacking their beaks and stamping clawed feet.

‘Chester, I need more imagery on whatever that is.’ She touched the screen with a hand gloved in the new biotech armour they were calling ‘skin’ and highlighted the signature. Glancing over through the small side window, she saw a turret on the top of Chester’s car turn and disperse drones like Christmas baubles, which sped away through the air. Imagery immediately began to come in, automatically cleaned and sequenced for viewing. The first still image showed a thing almost like a heron standing ten feet tall. Its long muscular neck terminated in a dark head resembling a bird’s skull, with white markings like a Rorschach blot running down its centre. Recognition software struggled with the creature for a moment, eventually coming up with ‘unknown’. Video feed kicked in to show it loping, head down, between the cycads and rearing up at intervals to inspect the big herbivores.

‘Predator, obviously,’ said Chandar. ‘But one we haven’t seen before. Nasty-looking fucker.’

‘You seen anything here that isn’t nasty?’ enquired Chester.

Annette chose this moment to interject, ‘I guess it’s a tendency for extremophiles to take on a less pleasing appearance.’

This was a dig at Chandar, whose adaptation to this world had resulted in insect mandibles on his face. He could have had them removed but chose not to. Ursula contemplated the word Annette had used.

All life on this world was extremophile, and that included the human colonists, but via a different course. Bio-archaeologists studying the Polity survey data had ascertained that in the far distant past life had evolved here much as it had on Earth. The planetary water had previously been in oceans and not in underground aquifers as now. Life had obtained sufficient complexity to produce megafauna and flora, but then, about five million years ago, the sun had changed. It had become more active, gradually. It almost seemed like intent, for it did not flood the planet with enough radiation to kill everything, but produced just sufficient to penetrate the weak magnetosphere and drive intense mutation. The evolutionary race had speeded up. Plants that had once just been fodder for herbivores evolved the gamut of defences, evidenced by the spines now sliding down Ursula’s front screen. Concurrent with this, the herbivores developed their own defences and methods to access their food supply, but these changes also made them much more difficult prey for the predators, which of course also evolved. In short, everything stepped up a level in lethality, and the place was lacking in the soft and cuddly.

‘We watch for now and stay wary,’ she told the others. ‘We’ve no idea what this thing can do.’

After studying the brontopods for a minute, the heron-thing probed the ground and found it still loose from cultivation. Stretching upright, it rippled down its length and its legs melded together. Then it looped over like a worm, sprouting paddle-like digging limbs, and speared its head downwards.

‘What the fuck?’ said Ursula.

‘Fast body morphing there,’ commented Chandar. No one else said anything.

The creature’s course towards the herbivores was visible at first, then it disappeared like a shark diving. A moment later, one of the brontopods shrieked, and the others immediately fled, hurtling away from their stricken fellow.

‘Chandar! Move your – damn!’

A brontopod crashed into the side of Chandar’s car and tipped it on its side, scrabbling over it. The tons of heavy animal were too much for armour and chassis, always under constant repair, and the car distorted, popping out its front screen. Ursula swore and began to move her car over, but Chandar quickly rolled out through the screen and stood up. He wore their new ‘skin’ and, carrying a laser carbine, began trotting over to Annette’s car, which was closest. He should be okay, she thought. The skin protected him from the poisonous spines, while all but one of the brontopods were heading for the horizon.

‘Move it, Chandar,’ she said.

‘You tried running in this stuff yet?’ he enquired.

She returned her attention to the remaining brontopod. Abruptly its screaming ceased and it slumped, puking chewed-up cycad. It looked dead and she was damned sure the movement she could see came from the thing inside it. While she watched, one of the armoured sections in the brontopod’s side lifted to expose knotted red muscle, the worm-thing heaving this up as it nosed out of a hole issuing clear fluid. The section fell aside and more of the thing came out. It had gone through further transformations. Its limbs were now jointed hooks, doubtless perfect for tugging it through the flesh of its prey, and its head a nightmare creation of a wide slot mouth surrounded by buzz-saw mandibles, though it still retained the white markings she’d seen earlier.

‘Very fast adaptation,’ she noted to the others, trying to keep to the practical and the factual while she felt something creeping up her spine. That was scarily fast.

It rose up and paused. The head sprouted a stalk that swelled at the end and opened a double pupil eye, which turned towards Chandar. The creature flowed out of the corpse of its victim, its legs folding in and melding to leave only four, which rapidly grew fat with muscle and acquired feet that could not have been better designed for the loose ground and poisonous cycad web. Its body contracted and fattened too as it hit the churned soil, its tail deflating to a whip-like thing, in which vertebrae appeared visible. It now looked like some kind of nightmare hellhound, as it first began loping towards Chandar, then accelerated. Ursula just gaped, trying to get her mind in motion. They couldn’t use the flamers they had mounted on the cars because of the danger of incinerating Chandar.

‘Carbines now!’ she shouted, hitting her belt release and grabbing up her own weapon. She quickly reached the door of her car and felt the usual reluctance to face what might be out there, but opened it and did step out. She initiated her helmet, its skin covering flowing into place and attaching around the edges of the chain-glass visor.

Chandar shouldered his carbine and opened fire on the creature hurtling towards him. He hit it once behind its head, burning a smoking hole. The thing halted, turning its head from side to side, and Chandar used the opportunity to run. The hole closed rapidly as a shot from Chester hit it again further down its body, but this time causing much less damage. Annette opened the door to her armoured car, stepped out and went down on one knee to fire her carbine. Even as the beam struck, a ripple of iridescence passed down the creature’s body, which turned as reflective as mercury.

‘Oh hell,’ Ursula muttered.

She joined the others in firing at the creature, but the shots simply had no effect.

‘Redirect at the ground around its feet!’ Ursula bellowed.

The steam explosions and flying debris did slow it some, but Chandar paused before reaching Annette’s car and fired again at close range. He should not have. His shots just raised black areas on its body – most of the energy reflected away – and the creature leaped and came down on him hard, slamming him to the ground. He tried to crawl but turned bloody in seconds as, just like a dog, it shook him. Someone was screaming . . . him? No, Ursula saw the thing rip his spine out, which must have killed him instantly. It began to shear away his limbs.

‘Get inside, Annette!’

She continued screaming, backing away as the thing sucked in Chandar’s limbs like spaghetti and, with its mandibles, began chopping up his torso. But then it dropped Chandar’s remains and leaped towards Annette, driving her back in through the open door of the car. The screaming continued for a moment, until it morphed into other sounds. The creature’s body rippled and pulsed as it swallowed.

‘Back in your cars! Now!’ Ursula ordered. ‘We head for the base.’

* * *

Ursula felt sick and angry. The creature had simply not stopped coming after them as they fled in their armoured cars. Returning to the worm form, it had tried repeatedly to penetrate Chester’s car in the same way it had the brontopod. After it bounced away with its head reforming, Chester hit it with the turret-mounted flamethrower he had on the roof and sent it writhing to the ground, allowing them to gain some miles on it. But it returned, dog form and asbestos white now, and attacked again, and again. Finally it seemed to find the required approach and, splaying its limbs to hold it in place, it attached its head end to Chester’s car like a leech. Later analysis of the damage showed it had been grinding into the vehicle’s armour with chains of diamond-hard teeth, lubricated with an acid that ate into the alloy while the teeth ablated the ceramic component. It had got two inches into three-inch thick armour by the time they came in sight of the base. A railgun, swiftly pulled out of storage and running on a hastily-prepared and dangerous program, scoured it from the car. Some projectiles slammed into the armour, breaking apart, and riddled one side of Chester’s body with fragments. The railgun hits should have been enough to kill the creature but, even partially dismembered, it had collapsed away, worm-like again, then protruded paddle legs and burrowed into the ground. Ursula grimaced at that. The thing had not been destroyed.

It surfaced some distance from where it had escaped the railgun, and biologists at the base tracked it using the satellite. They saw it return to its earlier brontopod prey but, this being a world where a free lunch wasn’t to be ignored, the scavengers and morticians had already arrived. Creatures like armoured hyenas, which bore some resemblance to the dog form the creature had taken, were tearing the corpse apart. Swarms of insects rose in clouds around them as they fed, and the remaining meat crawled with worms, bony hook-tailed nymphs resembling foetuses and the bright green threads of some fungus or plant. The creature reared out of the ground nearby and instantly split open one of the scavengers, feeding on it while the others fled, shrieking and hooting.

The biologists and ecologists, who of course were recording this feed, kept watching the creature – it was the most fascinating thing they’d seen in a while. They gave it the placeholder name ‘raptor’, then with the addition of a prefix, a cacoraptor. After feeding, and almost tripling its mass, it closed up its paddle legs and lay on the ground shivering and rippling until the shape of new limbs became etched on its surface and folded out. Retaining its birdlike head, its body returned to the earlier dog form, it set out fast. It circled the outer fence, keeping its distance from the deterrents. The satellite lost it when it returned to its worm form and disappeared into the ground.

That was just the beginning. Only days later, two armoured cars, collecting samples beyond the defensive perimeter, had been hit. Because the cars were so far from the base, they didn’t have time to get in range of the base railgun. Two more colonists died, screaming in their vehicles, no remains were recovered, and the cars had to be abandoned because they were infested with other Threpsian life. It got worse when the raptors hit one of their outposts shortly after the two cars – there were no survivors. Then another facility was attacked and Ursula made the decision to send four of their grav-cars. They managed to get all except four of the colonists out, but one of the grav-cars crashed, severely injuring the occupants.

Twenty-eight people were now dead.

Ursula marched down the corridor and came to a halt at a door. She needed to be calm and precise. Oren Salazar’s laboratory was about the largest research area in the base. Here he had created the rugged crop plants that could grow on Threpsis, and here he had also designed the tweaks to the colonists’ nanosuites which enabled them to eat those crops. He constantly wanted samples of anything new found in the wilds of this world. As she entered his storage area to walk through to his laboratory, Ursula studied his collection and tried to shed her anger.

Many samples sat in sealed cylinders with monitoring equipment attached all around them. One wall consisted of hundreds of drawers filled with nanoscope capsules, each containing microscopic life. Another wall with larger drawers contained creatures, or samples of creatures, up to the size of a fist. Some, including plants, he had on display in chain-glass cases of various sizes. She paused by a case containing the head of a brontopod, sliced neatly from front to back with its internals exposed under a glossy film. She remembered a piece of ancient art on Earth, before the Quiet War and domination of the AIs. Another case contained one of the cycads, alive and well but its growth in some manner retarded. Further recognizable plants sat in a series of glass cylinders while a stand of flat glass cases that could be pulled out of a rack contained a huge range of mid-size life forms preserved in some fluid. She noted all the scanners and instruments directed at the cases and often penetrating them. Oren never stopped studying his collection. Like many of the colonists, he had adapted to function without sleep and never stopped working. And the latest sample they’d brought him had occupied his attention for the last two days and nights.

She finally entered the gleaming chaos of his main laboratory. Oren was studying screen views projected from a nanoscope, at present poised over a long glass cylinder, its business end inserted through a hole. Ursula noted the caps at each end of the cylinder, with pipes attached, ready to run oxygen through the bunches of iron nanorods they contained. These were iron-burners which, should they be initiated, would burn to ash the contents of the cylinder. She nodded approval at this precaution. These things were highly aggressive, and the thing in the cylinder was by no means dead.

She studied the cacoraptor in the cylinder – this one in worm form – and became lost in her thoughts for a while, worrying about the future. The things were lethal, unexpected, and why the Polity survey hadn’t picked up on them she had no idea. In her less optimistic moments, she wondered if their presence might signal the necessary retreat of humans from Threpsis. She imagined returning to the shuttle, loading up all their gear to head for orbit, and asking for Polity evacuation. But no, she had invested all that she was in making this break from the AI-dominated Polity, and the humiliation of return would be too much. They could deal with this. She turned away from the thing and moved up behind Oren to peer over his shoulder at the screens.

Complex organics were revealed under the nanoscope. She identified molecular helixes, odd outgrowths and surrounding structures that might be some form of RNA, twisted rings and ellipsoids and forked strands. All were moving in a slow dance, everything constantly changing. Even her limited knowledge told her she was seeing something loaded with much more organic data than human DNA, including the modern iterations of it. Other views showed cellular structures that could have come from any Terran animal or xenomorph, though one did draw her attention more than the others. Here she observed a cellular structure in a constant state of change. The cells put out spears to shift positions, continuously rearranging, until every now and again some major change occurred and the whole mass shifted like a kaleidoscope image.

‘So what do you have for us?’ she asked tightly.

‘Fascinating, absolutely fascinating,’ Oren replied. He pushed his chair back and stood up, stepped over to the cylinder and peered inside.

After the appearance of further cacoraptors in the lands beyond the colony, and the deaths that had occurred, Ursula had decided they really needed more data. So they’d run out an armoured car to the largest concentration of the creatures, remotely controlled and with a deliberate weakness in its armour. They’d put liquid helium jets inside it, as well as electrostunners and projectile injectors of various toxins they had learned worked against the cacoraptors. This creature had inevitably attacked the car and got inside through the weak point. When they brought the car back, Ursula had taken every precaution possible: sealing the bay they brought the car into, surrounding the car with weapons and further liquid helium. She’d not been surprised to see the thing still mobile when they opened the car, but the second jet of helium froze it solid, and there were no casualties.

‘How did I know you would say that,’ she said.

Calm, stay calm.

He turned his head right round to her and, as ever, she felt her own neck wince in response to the motion. For Oren was an example of his own interests. He looked nominally human, from a distance, but close up the difference became more evident. Similar to some surgeons who liked to be more at one with their work, he had found two hands a limitation. Unlike many of them, however, he did not have cybernetic arms extending from attachment points on his lower ribcage, but had gone right into his own source code and altered it. Two arms extended from there, double-jointed like his nominally conventional arms, and with long wrists that had a great degree of motion. The hands at the end of these possessed bilateral symmetry with extra thumbs, the tips of each digit narrow and sensitive. Like some of the colonists, he could also extend claws – not for defence but for his work.

Oren walked on wide feet that offered more stability, his spine could flex as far backwards as it could go forwards, while his limbs moved as if on ball joints. He could turn his head right around, while the head itself had its differences too. His eyes were larger and more protuberant, with musculature around them enabling him to focus on things close to microscopic. The extra brain matter needed to control his extra limbs and enhanced senses was contained in a skull that protruded at the back. His ears, mouth and the rest of his physiognomy were the only things apparently normal – although Ursula suspected they were not, and that he only retained this veneer of humanity for the sake of others.

‘I still think multidapt is a better name for these creatures,’ he said, waving one of his subsidiary limbs, ‘but cacoraptor has stuck now.’

‘I’m not even sure where the name came from,’ said Ursula, containing her irritation. ‘Some discussion about demons, then cacodemons.’ She had to be patient with Oren. He would go through his discoveries before getting to the meat of the matter, which was how the hell they could kill the things.

‘Whatever.’ He turned round, his head still facing her, which eased the psychological crick in her neck. ‘Millennia of mutation and evolution have produced in these creatures a genetic library more extensive than anything I’ve ever seen. The constant pressure of survival has enabled them to apply this database with close to immediate effect. Something hits them and they toughen up, something penetrates their skin and they grow armour – this is all on the physiological level. However, there is also a mental component we saw with that raptor that killed Chandar. It wanted to see something that perhaps puzzled it so it grew an eye. And it wanted to move faster to get to this distant prey which, I surmise, it sensed to be loaded with water and other useful nourishment, so it grew longer more muscular legs.’

‘Yes, but are there weaknesses in this ability to change? Some point of penetration?’

‘As we have seen, the extent of adaptation is phenomenal,’ Oren replied. ‘I fear that seeking out points of penetration will simply result in a stronger animal.’

‘That’s not the kind of answer I came here for.’

Oren shrugged – a strange gesture for someone with a body like his.

‘Our techniques at present are the best we have available: weapon strikes that destroy the creature before it can adapt. However, even that has its limitations because now they are showing behavioural adaptation alongside their physical ones.’

‘They go into the ground,’ said Ursula. She felt Oren was deliberately closing down options in order to make, as he had many times before, his casual suggestions. They always went in one direction and she needed to get past them to learn any raptor weaknesses she was sure he’d found, and which she could exploit.

‘A dangerous enemy,’ she said. And, to lead him to his point, ‘It seems we are running out of options.’

‘Our grossly material technology gives us advantages outside of our bodies,’ he said, ‘but as you can see it is steadily being destroyed and we are struggling to maintain and renew it. The cacoraptors have no such disadvantage – in essence their technology is them. We need to do something similar. We need to upgrade ourselves radically to face this threat.’

Ursula nodded: there it was. She’d seen much of Oren’s research, his theories and his plans. She had seen schematics of weapons grown from the human body – slug throwers and energy weapons. She had seen humans with capacitance layers in their bones, organic superconductors lacing through their bodies, hard technology meshed with flesh – beings she felt could no longer be classified as human or even extremophile human. This was where he wanted them to go, even further than they had already.

‘It’s an idea and already we are far beyond what we were when we first came here,’ said Ursula carefully. ‘However, this would require long-term development and testing, while the threats we face are immediate. Even while we institute something like this, we could be wiped out. You know this. Don’t forget that while you are down here deep in your research, people are fighting and dying up there and’ – she stabbed a finger at the cacoraptor in the cylinder – ‘if we fail, one of those will be in here with you, and not sitting safely between two iron-burners.’

He grimaced, and nodded. ‘You have that right, I guess – I sometimes get carried away by my enthusiasm for this.’ He then perked up. ‘But it’s certainly something to think on for the future – the environment here is very hostile.’

‘Quite, but right now I need to know how to kill these fuckers.’

Oren stepped past her to a nearby console. He turned his head to face her again while operating a touchpad and bringing up a control hologram with one of his extra hands. The way he worked this while still looking at her seemed to confirm her suspicion that he had some form of vision, or other sense beyond touch, in his fingertips.

‘I’m distributing data now,’ he said, ‘along with methodology.’

‘The gist?’ Ursula asked.

‘Their adaptation, their speed of transformation, is of course energy hungry, on a world where sources of nourishment are hard won. They are very efficient in their use of biological energy sources but still, when transforming, they burn through a lot of what might be described as their fat. I’ve listed toxins that build up in that fat and can interfere with adaptation, powerful oxidants that inhibit too. We have many new things to try but, basically, they all interfere with that energy process.’

‘But do not kill,’ said Ursula.

‘Some of them might,’ Oren allowed.

‘Okay, let me know if you come up with anything else.’ She made to go.

‘There is something else.’

She turned back. ‘Go on.’

After hesitating, he said, ‘It is dangerous and involves major physical transformations,’ he said. ‘It’s very radical.’

‘Back to that again, Oren? Haven’t we already been over this, time and time again?’

‘You don’t understand.’ He looked crestfallen.

‘Oh I do,’ she replied. ‘I do.’

She stepped out of the laboratory and looked down at her hands, seeing they were shaking. She just breathed for a moment, then reached up and activated the coms unit on her collar. She had delayed making a decision on their next step for too long in the hope Oren would come up with something useful.

‘General address,’ she said, voice-activating that option. The coms unit beeped readiness and she continued, ‘Okay, people, listen up. As of right now, everybody outside the fence is to return inside, bringing as much of their equipment as they can. All sample collecting missions are henceforth cancelled. This will be a temporary measure until we find a solution to the raptor problem.’

She didn’t know what else to add, so after a moment tapped her coms unit and activated it again with two names: ‘Vrease and Callum.’

‘We’re listening,’ Callum replied.

‘Those multiguns you talked about – get on that.’

‘Will do,’ Callum replied firmly.

Ursula felt a small elevation in her mood. All the colonists had their expertise – she had confirmed that when they’d first gathered everyone – but Callum and Vrease were the best of them. The job would get done. They’d all known it wouldn’t be easy when they’d chosen this world and first set out.

Past

When those who had signed up to be colonists began arriving on Kalonan, Ursula met each of them personally. Later, as more and more arrived, she had to focus on organizing things. These people were diverse and uniquely themselves, but all had certain attributes in common. All of them were over a hundred and fifty years old, with some sliding into the start of their third century. They were intelligent, sophisticated and had done much with their lives, and all were experts in a particular discipline, often in many. They had also taken their fill of adventure during their time of ennui – that period of a person’s life when the length of their existence started to trigger boredom and dissatisfaction, and they increasingly sought out dangerous novelty. So Ursula knew they were signing up for other reasons.

‘What was your poison?’ asked Callum Iverson, who she had already assigned to her command staff. They stood together at a viewing window in the space station, gazing through it at an internal space dock. Callum of course was as familiar with such sights as she was – once having been a technician working in such places.

Ursula didn’t need to ask him what he meant by his question. ‘The usual to begin with: free climbing on Earth, Mars and other worlds with the minimum of survival gear.’ She took a coin out of her pocket and smiled down at it. The thing was worn out by the decisions it had made. With a grimace she put it away again and continued, ‘Swimming in dangerous oceans, lava surfing and, of course, just about every dangerous drug or body morph I could get my hands on.’

‘As all of us.’ Callum nodded. ‘But usually there’s one activity that comes to occupy the most of one’s time.’

‘Mine was exploring underwater caves on Desander,’ said Ursula.

‘Right – with just a gill and a harpoon, I’m guessing.’

‘Quite. Initially.’ Ursula grimaced at the memories. ‘I saw some nasty things down there and was lucky to make it out. As soon as I made it back to the surface, I took a trip back to Earth and did some studying. I still wanted dangerous novelty but decided I might as well spend my life doing something useful.’

‘That is . . . concerning,’ said Callum, frowning at her.

Ursula shook her head. ‘When I began putting together plans for this colony, that was my attitude. I now see it as a route to elevating some humans to a higher state, and one that doesn’t involve simply sliding into the realm of AI. I have to believe we can be something more.’

‘You see adaptation to a hostile environment as the course.’ Callum looked at her. ‘But it must concern you that there could be a degree of sublimation there?’

‘Not really. I seek success and not oblivion, and see it as akin to the occupation of the addict changing the course of her life. It’s a chance to make something completely my own . . . our own.’

Callum inclined his head. ‘We inspect the intricacies of our minds.’

Ursula wasn’t quite sure what to make of that as she gazed at the view. The shuttle before them – a massive thing nearly a mile long – had been opened all down its length. Other colonists were suited up, in the vacuum of the space dock, running loaders and robots and giant hoists to load their supplies. Every day now another load arrived via instantaneous transmission through a runcible to then be transported by slower conventional means up here from the surface of Kalonan. She turned from the inner viewing window and walked over to the one facing out into space. The Foucault sat out there in orbit. The Polity cargo hauler was a four-mile-long cylinder with a massive cluster of engines at the back – including the drive nacelles to submerge it in the faster-than-light continuum of U-space. Its diameter was two miles and, at present, it also stood open down one side to expose a cavernous hold, from which much structure had been removed, so their shuttle would fit inside.

‘We have everything now,’ she said, ‘but for one last item. I need to go and meet our biophysicist.’

‘Oren Salazar,’ said Callum. ‘A very smart man – I’m surprised you got him.’

‘Just lucky I guess,’ Ursula replied with a smile that covered her disquiet.

Ursula accepted Oren’s appearance because she had seen other more radical changes and, during her time of ennui, and before, had undergone them herself. But she knew, despite this, she would never get used to the wide degree of his head’s motion.

‘So, what made you change your mind? Earth Central Security let you go?’ she asked, as she entered the apartment she’d rented for him on Kalonan. The place had every luxury, could provide the best food from its fabricator, the best drinks and drugs. It had a bathroom where every conceivable ablution could be performed. Oren sat at a fold-out plastic table away from all this, street-food containers on the floor beside him. He had disassembled something and was working with it. She glanced across the room to the kitchen area and saw that he had taken the fabricator apart, for its components lay strewn on the kitchen counters; it was a portion of them that he was working on at his table, which looked as if it had been retrieved from a dump.

‘My equipment has arrived?’ he asked.

‘It’s come through the runcible but at present is still down here. It will be transported up to the shuttle tomorrow and Vrease says she’ll have your temporary laboratory installed the day after.’

He grimaced and continued his intricate work.

‘Earth Central Security was fine about you doing this?’ she rephrased the question. ‘ECS is normally quite reluctant to let useful people go and very reluctant to let them go with any of their research . . .’

He turned his head right round to look at her, his four hands still at work. ‘Probably eighty per cent of the nanosuite you and your fellow colonists intend to deploy is my work. The adaptogens and other tech, including the agricultural stuff and the xeno techniques . . . I am familiar with them. I see this as an opportunity for research and testing that expands my knowledge base. ECS sees it that way too. I am on a retainer and will return there afterwards.’

Ursula felt some disappointment. She had hoped she could snare him completely for this project – that he would become one of the colonists. ‘You’ll be leaving once we’re established?’

‘Yes, though that may take years and, when I am ready, I will train some people to take over. Many of those who are joining you have extensive knowledge of nanosuites and the other technologies and can take the requisite mental uploads.’

Of course there was still a chance that while he was there Oren might change his mind. Yes, others could learn from him but, even in this time of mental uploads, with augmentation both mental and physical, genius was still a nebulous thing. Oren had it in spades.

‘That will have to do, then,’ she said, taking a seat on a nearby sofa. ‘But we have yet to discuss your contract – degrees of responsibility and veto on my part and on yours.’

‘We already have the outline of that,’ he stated.

‘Yes. You will optimize the nanosuite to give us maximum survivability in the new environment: radiation resistance being the main aim, followed by adaptation of the crops and adaptation of us to the crops we can grow.’

‘There will be much more than that, as I am sure you are aware. The hostility of the environment indicates that alien biology – ours – will not be a barrier to many parasites and other life forms. A very large degree of immune ruggedness will be required. Also gross physical enhancements, and further requirements we are not yet aware of. I suspect the contract will have to cover a degree of . . . plasticity.’

‘Strange choice of word,’ Ursula noted.

‘Choices will have to be made.’

‘Then, as per the contract, we must agree when choices have to be made.’

‘Quite. It may be that your adaptations will have to be extreme.’

Ursula accepted the premise but felt uncomfortable with this, especially looking at what Oren had done to himself.

‘Many of the colonists have, in their time of ennui, experienced forms radically different from human standard,’ she said. ‘I too did this. All have returned to that standard and I believe it a psychological anchor. I don’t think many will agree to . . . large degrees of change. I won’t.’

‘I had understood your aim to be an advance in human evolution. Was I wrong?’

‘No, you were not, but while remaining human.’

‘A definition with wide parameters now . . .’ He smiled. ‘But all this will be a matter of agreement and negotiation on the ground, so is not an issue. I will head up to the shuttle tomorrow to oversee the work on my laboratory – some of the equipment is delicate.’

‘I am glad to have you with us,’ said Ursula. Curiosity finally overcame her. ‘Was the fabricator malfunctioning?’ she asked.

‘It was inefficient and not working to its optimum. I am making a few adjustments.’

The fabricator, she later learned just prior to the Foucault’s departure, produced a different kind of food after Oren reinstalled it. Nutrients and drugs were combined for fast and efficient entry into the human body, raising physical and mental performance to a peak. The hotel removed it because it was too unexpected for their usual guests, but sold it on to a pharmacy concern for study and replication if possible. Much later, on Threpsis, she wished she had thought a bit more about that, just as she wished she’d thought more about the fact that Oren was continuing to work for Earth Central Security, whose aims very much diverged from her own.

2

Present

The colonists glanced up at Ursula from around the car, some with reserve and others with hopeful expectation. They moved quickly and efficiently, she noted, with none of the numb tiredness of a few weeks ago. The upgrade again. Checking medical stats from the two medtechs, Lars and Donnaken, she had learned about sleep. For a long time it’d been medically possible to adjust people to do without it. Many here hadn’t chosen that option because either they liked sleep, or had found or heard that the adjustment came with mental side effects. It was a fairly new adjustment to be incorporated but not necessarily used in nanosuites. Now it seemed that those without it were sleeping less and less, while those who had it were occasionally falling into coma-like sleeps, haunted by nightmares. Major physiological changes were occurring and some disruption was to be expected, Oren had explained, but the changes were inexorably leading to greater strength, durability and efficient energy usage. The cost? Ursula wondered, now eyeing someone else down by the car.

Nursum was there. He was wearing the adaptive armour Oren had created, and constantly enhanced, based on the defences of local life forms here.