Eric Flint - Mother of Demons

The look Hector gave him was not filled with admiration.

" 'More or less' doesn't cut it, Julius. We're talking mano-a-mano here, not horseshoes."

Julius threw up his hands with exasperation.

"So I'm not a genius!" He blew out a deep breath. "All right, Hector. Try to imagine a mean, bad-tempered maia. With some kind of long tentacles instead of short arms. The tentacles will have some kind of cutting or stabbing tip-something like a horn, maybe."

"Are they going to be bigger or smaller than the maia?"

Julius pondered the question.

"Hard to say. Among invertebrates, predators are usually bigger than their prey. The same's generally true for marine predators, including vertebrates. But the rule doesn't always hold up with advanced land forms. Quite a few mammalian predators are smaller than their prey."

"That'd be a break."

Julius gave him a sidelong glance. "Not necessarily, amigo. Predators who are smaller than their prey usually hunt in packs."

Hector rolled his eyes. "That's great. Just great."

Julius was chewing his lip fiercely.

"But whether they're bigger or smaller than the maia, the predators will almost certainly be faster. Course, that's not saying much. That'll be one of our big advantages, by the way. I can't be positive, but I'm almost certain that human beings will be able to run a lot faster than anything on Ishtar."

He pointed a finger at Hector. " But -don't assume that because we can run faster that our reflexes are any faster. These predators can probably move their tentacles as fast as we can move our arms. Hell, even the maia can move their arms pretty quickly when they want to."

"Yeah, I know. I saw one of the kids fall off a maia's cowl the other day. Damned if the maia didn't catch her before she hit the ground."

The pilot scratched his chin thoughtfully.

"Weelll. I'd kinda been thinking in terms of swords, but-"

"No! Swords would be almost useless. If you tried to use it as a chopping weapon, you'd be trying to cut through that godawful tough mantle. Take hours. Unless you were El Cid or something, which we ain't. Same problem with axes. Look, Hector-there's one really vulnerable part on the body of a cephalopod: the head. Unless these critters are completely different from Terran cephalopods, which is possible but there's no way to tell for sure without cutting open-"

"Don't even think it, Julius."

"-I'm surrounded by saints! The point is, they don't have skulls. There's nothing protecting the brain except a mass of flesh. Which is probably thinnest right between the eyes."

"Well, you can use a sword to stab. Especially something like an epee."

Julius goggled. "You want to play matador with something that looks like a walking version of It Came From Beneath the Sea? Such a hero! Such cojones! Such a fucking moron!"

The pilot laughed. "All right, already!"

" Spears, Hector. We want spears. Something we can stab straight in with, while keeping a distance."

"Sounds good. What kind of spear, do you think?"

"You're asking me?" demanded Julius. "When we've got Indira? Who's spent a lifetime studying the wicked ways of times gone by, when men were men and didn't suffer fools gladly."

Indira proved a reluctant consultant, but Hector was finally able to get from her what he needed.

"It's basically an assegai," he explained to Julius four days later, showing him the spear he had made. "The blade's heavy, shaped like a narrow leaf, about forty centimeters long. It'll stab real good, and you can still chop with it if you have to. But instead of a short handle, like a real assegai, I put a long one on it. What do you think?"

The weapon was certainly ferocious-looking, thought Julius.

"I see you made the handle out of 'sortabamboo.' What's the blade made out of?"

"Steel. It's a piece of the battery shield."

"Why'd you use that? There can't be much of it. Why not use that stuff the boat's hull is made out of?"

"How many lifetimes you got? That's stuff's a weird alloy made out of titanium and God knows what else. Ask Adams, he could probably tell you. All I know is that they have to use special tooling in factories to work with it."

When asked, Adams confirmed that the metal of boat hulls was useless for anything except shelter and storage.

"Most refractory metal known to man. Titanium, basically, but-"

He began what would have been a long and arcane lecture on the process by which the metal was made, but Julius cut him short.

"Never mind, never mind. I'll take your word for it. That leaves us with a problem. We've only got enough of the shielding, and stuff like that, to make a few hundred steel spears."

"Then what's the problem? There are only a handful of us to begin with."

Julius restrained himself. "Some day, Doctor Adams, the children will grow up. And then they will have children. And then-do you get the drift?"

"I still don't see the problem. We'll simply have to find some iron ore and make our own metal."

A supercilious sniff. "You do know what iron ore looks like, don't you?"

Julius sighed heavily. "Of course I know what it looks like. Paleontologists are just specialized geologists, basically. But I have no idea how you make steel-or even iron-out of hematite. Do you?"

Needless to say, he didn't. Nor did Indira.

"But I'll tell you one thing," she said. "It's not easy. In fact, Julius, I wouldn't even think about it. Try to make bronze, if you can find copper and tin."

He frowned. "How do you know iron's hard to make?"

"Because it was invented so rarely in history. The only case that's certain is the Hittites. Many historians think that the Hittites were the only people who ever actually invented iron-everybody else got it through cultural diffusion. Personally, I think there's a strong case for an independent discovery in West Africa, and the Chinese-"

"For God's sake! Does everybody in this place have to play professor?"

She chuckled. "Sorry. The point is that bronze, unlike iron, was independently invented any number of times in human history. So it must be fairly easy to do."

Later, Hector commented: "Hey, Julius, you'd think all you super-educated types would know how to do something as basic as make iron."

"Au contraire, mon ami. Our super-education's the problem. Did you ever read Jules Verne's Mysterious Island?"

Hector shook his head.

"Well, it's about a small group of men who wind up on a desert island in the middle of the 19th century. Without anything except a couple of matches and a pocket watch. But one of them's an engineer, and over the next few years he invents everything. From scratch."

Julius frowned. "Actually, I've always suspected that Verne was stretching the possibilities. But it's barely plausible. And you know why? Because the hero was a 19th century engineer. A basic kind of guy, you might say. Whereas we-" He sighed. "As useless a bunch of over-educated specialists as you could ask for."

He glared at Hector. "That includes you, pal. Don't give me any of this simple-Sam-the-sailor-man routine. What do you know how to do? Besides fly spacecraft? Now, there's a useful skill in the stone age!"

Julius searched, but he found no hematite. Nor did he find any copper. Nor tin. Eventually, however, he found bronze. But he did not have to invent it, for it had already been invented on Ishtar. Any number of times.

Luckily, the discovery of bronze did not come for many years. Years in which the colony slowly settled into a stable and symbiotic existence with the owoc. Symbiotic, not parasitic. For although he was never able to invent metallurgy, the biologist was able to invent agriculture.

Julius had initially concentrated on domesticating the succulent oruc, whose leaves were the favorite food of the owoc. But he met with little success, for he soon discovered that it was a finicky plant. It would only grow in soil patches with just the right composition, and, try as he might, he was unable to reproduce the composition elsewhere in the valley.