CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
During duty hours, I played the role of the faithful lieutenant in the Marines. I located the dead on tagging duty and prepared what was left of my company for the next wave of the invasion. During off hours, I socialized with enlisted men. I pretended to know only what they knew, and I acted as if I thought we would survive this war. That was the life I lived as a normal Marine. I also had another life, however, one that made it hard to spend time with men who were not in the know. My second life was working with the Science Lab.
“We’ve examined the data Raymond and Lieutenant Harris collected,” William Sweetwater said as he waddled across the laboratory floor. As he always did, Sweetwater spoke in a tough and hip way, as if he did not realize that he was a pudgy little dwarf with a scraggly beard and thick glasses.
“Roll the feed,” Sweetwater said to Arthur Breeze.
On the ten-foot screen that hung from the ceiling, the Avatari mining operation appeared. The video feed started with what we saw the moment we entered the cavern, as captured by Ray Freeman’s visor. I stood with my back to the camera looking out at the spider-things.
As Freeman entered the cavern, the camera panned around it, and there the feed froze, focusing on one of the spider-things.
“What the hell is that?” asked General Glade.
“We think they’re drone workers. From what we can tell, they’re not much more intelligent than a mechanical arm on an assembly line,” Sweetwater said. “They appear to follow a simple digging protocol and show no signs of initiative or independent thought.
“This is interesting.” He waddled over to the screen. “See, here Lieutenant Harris comes within a few inches of that drone.” On the screen, I am walking down the path as one of the drone pops out of a hole and walks right past me.
“A sentient being would have attacked Lieutenant Harris,” Sweetwater said. “With those sharp forelegs, it could have cut him in half.”
“Do we assume that they came to hollow out the mountain?” asked General Haight, the Army’s new second- in-command. “Are they going to hollow the entire planet?”
“We’ve run a computer analysis of this cavern. If our estimates are correct, the cavern is 41.3 miles long. Assuming the mountain was solid when the Avatari arrived, we estimate that they have displaced approximately eight hundred cubic miles of mountain per week,” said Arthur Breeze. Unlike Sweetwater, Breeze did not refer to himself alone when he said “we.”
“It’s all hypothetical, of course,” he admitted. Tall, slightly built, and obviously insecure, Breeze tended to decorate his speech with more scientific terms than Sweetwater.
“Eight hundred miles per week?” General Haight asked. “That doesn’t seem like much. I mean, at eight hundred miles per week, it could take them years to hollow out the planet.”
“They don’t need to hollow out the planet,” Sweetwater said. “We think they are just trying to make enough space to hold their catalyst.”
Breeze leaned over the projector, and said, “William, perhaps we should show them the cave.”
“Good idea,” said Sweetwater.
On the screen, the cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres appeared. Freeman entered first and examined the spheres and the gas leaking out of them. He pulled out the meter Sweetwater gave him and held it over the mud-colored gas.
“This is not the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation that was found in other Avatari settlements such as the Mogat home world and Hubble,” Breeze announced.
Nobody responded.
“The military term is ‘distilled shit gas,’ ” Sweetwater said.
“Oh, sure, that,” the generals responded. They all knew about distilled shit gas.
“Raymond ran a number of tests on the gas, and we have been able to make some educated guesses about its properties,” Breeze said.
“That is a gas? It looks like muddy water,” General Glade observed.
“It is very dense; so dense, in fact, that it is on the border of the definition of both a gas and a liquid,” admitted Breeze.
“That’s what those things are after? They just want that mud stuff?” General Haight asked.
“Quite the opposite,” Sweetwater said. “That is what they are pouring into the planet.
“We think they are seeding the planet.” He waddled over to Breeze and handed him a data chip to place in the projector. When the picture resumed, it showed the same map of the galaxy that Brocius showed me back on Mars.
“We assume you are all familiar with this map?” Sweetwater asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he approached the screen, and continued. “Arthur, can you close in on Hubble?”
The screen switched to a close-up view of Hubble, the burned-out cinder of a planet on which a colony of Mogats tried to make a stand.
“Oh, sorry; would you display the prenova image of the Templar System?” Sweetwater asked.
A moment later the image of a very crowded solar system appeared. The system had three planets orbiting so close to its sun that the planets could not have been habitable. There was a fourth planet that had surface area covered by water, a fifth planet that resembled Earth, and seven more planets that looked too dark to provide productive habitation.
“This is the Templar System,” said Sweetwater. “The fifth planet is about the same distance from its sun as our Earth is from Sol.
“About fifty thousand years ago, some event caused Templar to expand suddenly, then go supernova,” Breeze said. “Please understand, gentlemen, that fifty thousand years is a very short amount of time in astronomical terms. In astronomy, we generally measure events by millions of years. In this case, a sun expanded and cooked everything around it in a matter of fifty thousand years.
“As you can see, the first three planets in this system vanished entirely. But this planet”—he pointed to the fifth planet again—“this planet survived after a fashion.”
The screen now showed the familiar murky landscapes of Hubble.
“We sent a military force to this planet a few years back and found that everything on it was made of the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound,” Sweetwater said.
“Distilled shit gas?” one of the generals asked.
“That was not the only time we ever encountered that gas,” Sweetwater said. “Arthur, will you please show us the Mogats’ solar system?”
The screen showed a new solar system. Like the Templar System, this one had gone dark. “This is the planet on which the Mogats built their home world,” Sweetwater said.
General Hill, from the Air Force, started to speak, but Sweetwater cut him off. “Their home world was nearly the exact same distance from its sun as Hubble was from Templar …as Earth is from Sol …as New Copenhagen is from Nigellus.”
The generals remained silent. They stared at the screen, which once again showed the map with the Avatari movements across the galaxy. “We have come to the conclusion that the same solar positioning that makes planets productive for human habitation also makes them desirable to the Avatari,” Sweetwater said. “That would explain why they have only sleeved the planets we have colonized or planned to colonize.”
“Why would they pump distilled shit gas into a planet?” General Newcastle asked, now rejoining the discussion.
“It’s not shit gas,” said Sweetwater. “The stuff they’re importing into New Copenhagen is something else that we think can be turned into shit gas. It’s highly toxic. Direct contact with the gas would be fatal. A healthy man who breathed this gas would die in under a minute. A few traces of this gas seeped into Lieutenant Harris’s helmet and left him with a second-degree burn.”
“The toxicity level from this gas is extreme,” Breeze added. “If you poured a single gallon of that gas into Valhalla Lake, you would contaminate the water. That would be a ratio of one part gas to 160 million parts water, and the water would be rendered unsalvageable.”
