Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (75 page)

“Until the very day I get indoor plumbing,” Savitri said. “Which, in itself, would imply I had an indoor in which to put it.”

“It’s the Roanoke dream,” I said.

“Which isn’t going to be able to
start
until we get all these colonists out of this tent city and into their homesteads,” Savitri said.

“You’re not the first person to mention this to me,” I said. I was about to say more but was interrupted as Zoë crossed our path.
“There you are,” she said, and then thrust her hand at me, which was filled with something. “Look. I found a pet,” she said.

I looked at the something in her hand. It stared back. It looked a little like a rat that got caught in a taffy puller. Its most distinguishing characteristics were its four oval eyes, two on either side of its head, and the fact that it, like every other vertebrate creature we’d seen on Roanoke so far, had opposable thumbs on its three-fingered hands. It was using them to balance on Zoë’s hand.

“Isn’t he cute?” Zoë asked. The thing appeared to belch, which Zoë took as a sign to feed it a cracker she had stored in a pocket. It grabbed it with one hand and started chomping away.

“If you say so,” I said. “Where did you find it?”

“There’s a bunch of them outside the mess hall,” Zoë said, showing it to Babar. He sniffed at the thing; it hissed back. “They’ve been watching us as we eat.” This rang a bell with me; suddenly I was aware I had been seeing them too over the last week. “I think they were hungry,” Zoë continued. “Gretchen and I went out to feed them, but they all ran away. Except for this guy. He came right up and took a cracker from me. I think I’ll keep him.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” I said. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

“Sure I do,” Zoë said. “He’s been around the mess hall.”

“You’re missing my point,” I said.

“I got your point, ninety-year-old dad,” Zoë said. “But come on. If it were going to inject me with poison and try to eat me, it probably would have done it by now.” The thing in her hand finished its cracker and burped again, and then suddenly leapt out of Zoë’s hand and scurried off in the direction of the storage container barricade. “Hey!” Zoë cried.

“Loyal like a puppy, that thing is,” I said.

“When he comes back, I’m going to tell him all the horrible
things you’ve said,” Zoë said. “And then I’m going to let him poo on your head.”

I tapped the nightpail. “No, no,” I said. “That’s what this is for.”

Zoë curled her lip at the sight of the nightpail; she was not a big fan. “Yuck. Thanks for the image.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. Out of the blue, it struck me that Zoë was missing a couple of shadows. “Where are Hickory and Dickory?” I asked.

“Mom asked them to come with her to look at something,” Zoë said. “Which is actually why I came looking for you. She wanted you to come look at something. She’s on the other side of the barricade. By the north entrance.”

“All right,” I said. “Where will you be?”

“I’ll be in the square, of course,” Zoë said. “Where else
is
there to be?”

“Sorry, honey,” I said. “I know you and your friends are bored.”

“No kidding,” Zoë said. “We all knew colonization was supposed to be difficult, but no one told us it was going to be
boring
.”

“If you’re looking for something to do, we could start up a school,” I said.

“We’re bored, so you suggest
school
?” Zoë said. “Who
are
you? Also, not likely, since you’ve confiscated all our PDAs. It’s going to be hard to teach us anything when we don’t have lessons.”

“The Mennonites have books,” I said. “Old-fashioned ones. With pages and everything.”

“I know,” Zoë said. “They’re the only ones not going completely insane with boredom, too. God, I miss my PDA.”

“The irony must be crushing,” I said.

“I’m going to leave you now,” Zoë said. “Before I throw a rock at you.” Despite the threat, she gave me and Savitri a quick hug before she left. Babar walked off with her; she was more fun.

“I know how she feels,” Savitri said, as we resumed walking.

“You want to throw a rock at me, too?” I said.

“Sometimes,” Savitri said. “Not right now. No, about missing her PDA. I miss mine, too. Look at this.” Savitri reached into her back pants pocket and pulled out a spiral notebook, a small stack of which had been made a gift to her by Hiram Yoder and the Mennonites. “This is what I’m reduced to.”

“Savage,” I said.

“Joke all you want,” Savitri said, and she put the notebook back. “Going from a PDA to a notepad is
hard
.”

I didn’t argue with this. Instead, we walked out the north gate of the village, where we found Jane with Hickory and Dickory, and two members of the
Magellan
’s security complement whom she had deputized. “Come look at this,” she said, and walked over to one of the storage containers on the perimeter.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“These,” Jane said, and pointed at the container, near the top, about three meters up.

I squinted. “Those are scratches,” I said.

“Yes. We’ve found them on other containers, too. And there’s more,” Jane said, and walked over to two other containers. “Something’s been digging here,” she said. “It looks like something’s been trying to dig under these containers.”

“Good luck with that,” I said. The containers were more than two meters in width.

“We found one hole on the other side of the perimeter that was nearly a meter in length,” Jane said. “Something’s trying to get in at night. It can’t jump over the containers, so it’s trying to go under instead. And it’s not just one. We’ve got lots of vegetation tramped down around here, and lots of different-sized paw prints on the containers. Whatever they are, they’re in a pack.”

“Are these the big animals folks have seen in the brush?” I asked.

Jane shrugged. “No one’s seen any of them close up, and nothing comes around here during the day. Normally, we’d post infrared cameras up at the top of the containers, but we can’t here.” Jane didn’t have to explain why; the sentry cameras, like almost every other piece of technology we owned, communicated wirelessly, and wireless was a security risk. “And whatever they are, they’re avoiding being seen by the night sentry. But the night sentry isn’t using nightscopes, either.”

“Whatever they are, you think they’re dangerous,” I said.

Jane nodded. “I don’t see herbivores being this dedicated to getting inside. Whatever’s out here sees us and smells us and wants to get in to see what we’re like. We need to find out what they are and how many of them there are.”

“If they’re predators, their numbers are limited,” I said. “Too many predators will deplete the stock of prey.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “But that still doesn’t tell us how many there are or what sort of threat they are. All we know is that they’re out here at night, and they’re big enough to almost be able to jump the containers, and smart enough to try tunneling under. We can’t let people begin to homestead until we know what sort of threat they represent.”

“Our people are armed,” I said. Among the supplies was a store of ancient, simple rifles and non-nanobotic ammunition.

“Our people have firearms,” Jane said. “But most of them haven’t the slightest idea how to use them. They’re going to end up shooting themselves before they shoot anything else. And it’s not only humans at risk. I’m more concerned about our livestock. We can’t really afford to lose many of them to predators. Not this early.”

I looked out toward the brush. Between me and the tree line, one of the Mennonite men was instructing a group of other colonists on the finer points of driving an old-fashioned tractor.
Farther out a couple of colonists were collecting soil so we could check its compatibility with our crops. “That’s not going to be a very popular position,” I said to Jane. “People are already complaining about being cooped up in town.”

“It won’t take that long to find them,” Jane said. “Hickory and Dickory and I are going to take the watch tonight, up on top of the containers. Their eyesight drops down into the infrared range, so they might see them coming.”

“And you?” I asked. Jane shrugged. After her revelation back on the
Magellan
about being reengineered, she’d kept mostly quiet about the full range of her abilities. But it wasn’t a stretch to assume her visual range had expanded like the rest of her abilities. “What are you going to do when you spot them?” I asked.

“Tonight, nothing,” Jane said. “I want to get an idea of what they are and how many there are. We can decide what we’re going to do then. But until then we should make sure everyone is inside the perimeter an hour before sunset and that anyone outside the perimeter during the day has an armed guard.” She nodded to her human deputies. “These two have weapons training, and there are several others in the
Magellan
crew who have as well. That’s a start.”

“And no homesteading until we get a grip on these things,” I said.

“Right,” Jane said.

“It’ll make for a fun Council meeting,” I said.

“I’ll break it to them,” Jane said.

“No,” I said. “I should do it. You already have the reputation as the scary one. I don’t want you always being the one who bears the bad news.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Jane said.

“I know,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you should always do it, though.”

“Fine,” Jane said. “You can tell them that I expect we’ll know quickly enough whether these things represent a threat. That should help.”

“We can hope,” I said.

“Don’t we have any information on these creatures?” Manfred Trujillo asked. He and Captain Zane walked beside me now as I headed toward the village’s information center.

“No,” I said. “We don’t even know what they look like yet. Jane’s going to find out tonight. So far the only creatures we know anything about are those rat-things at the mess hall.”

“The fuglies,” Zane said.

“The what?” I asked.

“The fuglies,” Zane said. “That’s what the teenagers are calling them. Because they’re fucking ugly.”

“Nice name,” I said. “Point is, I don’t think we can claim to have a full understanding of our biosphere from the fuglies alone.”

“I know you see value in being cautious,” Trujillo said. “But people are getting restless. We’ve brought people to a place they know nothing about, told them they can’t ever talk to their families and friends again, and then given them nothing to do for two entire weeks. We’re in limbo. We need to get people going on the next phase of their lives, or they’re going to keep dwelling on the fact that their lives as they knew them have been entirely taken away.”

“I know,” I said. “But you know as well as I do we’ve got
nothing
on this world. You two have seen the same files I have. Whoever did the so-called survey of this planet apparently didn’t bother to spend more than ten minutes on it. We’ve got the basic biochemistry of the planet and that’s pretty much it. We’ve got almost no information on flora and fauna, or even if it breaks down
into
flora and fauna. We don’t know if the soil will grow our crops. We don’t
know what native life we can eat or use. All information the Department of Colonization usually provides a new colony, we don’t have. We have to find all this stuff out for our own
before
we start, and unfortunately in that we’ve got a pretty big handicap.”

We arrived at the information center, which was a grand name for the cargo container we’d modified for the purpose. “After you,” I said, holding the first set of doors for Trujillo and Zane. Once we were all in, I sealed the door behind me, allowing the nanobotic mesh to completely envelop the outer door, turning it a featureless black, before opening the interior door. The nanobotic mesh had been programmed to absorb and cloak electromagnetic waves of all sorts. It covered the walls, floor and ceiling of the container. It was unsettling if you thought about it; it was like being in the exact center of nothing.

The man who had designed the mesh waited inside the center’s interior door. “Administrator Perry,” Jerry Bennett said. “Captain Zane. Mr. Trujillo. Nice to see you back in my little black box.”

“How is the mesh holding up?” I asked.

“Good,” Bennett said, and pointed at the ceiling. “No waves get in, no waves get out. Schrödinger would be jealous. I need more cells, though. The mesh sucks power like you wouldn’t believe. Not to mention all the rest of this equipment.” Bennett motioned to the rest of the technology in the center. Because of the mesh, it was the only place on Roanoke where there was technology that you wouldn’t find past the middle of the twentieth century on Earth, save power technology that did not run on fossil fuels.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “You’re a miracle worker, Bennett.”

“Nah,” he said. “I’m just your average geek. I’ve got those soil reports you wanted.” He handed over a PDA, and I fondled it for a moment before looking at the screen. “The good news is the soil samples I’ve seen so far look good for our crops in a general sense.
There’s nothing in the soil that will kill them or stunt their growth, at least chemically. Each of the samples was crawling with little critters, too.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Trujillo asked.

“Got me,” Bennett said. “What I know about soil management I read as I was processing these samples. My wife did a little gardening back on Phoenix and seemed to be of the opinion that having a bunch of bugs was good because they aerated the soil. Who knows, maybe she’s right.”

“She’s right,” I said. “Having a healthy amount of biomass is usually a good thing.” Trujillo looked at me skeptically. “Hey, I farmed,” I said. “But we also don’t know how these creatures will react to our plants. We’re introducing new species into a biosphere.”

“You’re officially beyond anything I know about the subject, so I’ll move on,” Bennett said. “You asked if there was any way for me to adapt the technology we have to switch off the wireless components. Do you want the long or short answer?”

“Let’s start with the short answer,” I said.

“Not really,” Bennett said.