Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

It had been sited in a small valley that was a natural habitat for the gargul plant, a bush of yellow-and-scarlet sponge-like dendrites whose sap contained wondrously complex molecules that could be employed as vaccine bases. Such compounds were a big factor in the original settlement effort. Santa Chico's vegetation was a natural pharmacopoeia, which when harvested properly produced an astonishing array of medical and industrial applications. Now the garguls had returned to the factory, growing over and under the inert machinery. In many cases, Lawrence could see fissures in the pipes and organolytic crackers allowing the bush to take root. Fluffy lichens tarnished the big metal mountings. Pink moniliform fungi spiraled up support struts. Vines and creepers scaled the highest burner towers, forming thick-webbed buttresses.

Jeeps and trucks transporting the platoons fanned out from the narrow, overgrown track and halted beside the fecund equipment. Captain Lyaute ordered a sweep of the area. "I know it looks like a complete waste of time," he told the platoons over the general frequency. "But we have to find out if anything can be salvaged from this crock of shit."

Lawrence took Kibbo, Amersy, Nic and Jones with him. They stuck together as they searched their assigned section of the factory. For an hour they wandered through the tangle of machinery. Green-and-yellow-striped tigergrass had sprouted along the roads between the equipment, reaching their knees, which made it tough to walk even with Skin. Pipes that looked as if they were made out of bark arched overhead, connecting tanks to refinery buildings. Dark, dank fluids dripped down from small splits. They walked around ion exchangers and splitters grafted together out of translucent mushrooms the size of apartment blocks. Metal pumps and valves jutted out of the ground at odd intervals, hopelessly antiquated and out of place amid the slick biomechanical systems. One end of their section had an office block of stacked oblong rooms in a cube of girders: no power, broken windows, dead electronics. When they peered in through the open doors, creatures slithered through the darker recesses, escaping observation. There was nothing of any value anywhere. Nothing left working.

Every time they saw a bird in the distance, Lawrence flinched. Four of the fleet's drop gliders had collided with windshrikes, flying animals larger than pterodactyls. The impacts had killed the windshrikes instantly, but they'd also sent the drop gliders tumbling out of the sky to smash across the landscape.

That was when Lawrence knew they'd made a mistake coming here. From the moment 435KN9's drop glider ashed down in the lake outside Roseport all he wanted to do was get into a spaceplane and fly back up to a starship. If there were any left. He really hadn't wanted to fly down to the surface to begin with.

They'd encountered exo-spheric weapons on their approach. One starship wiped out completely, all hands lost Two more badly damaged. You couldn't keep that sort of news from the platoons in the surviving starships.

Rumor had it that at first the admiral and the captains didn't even know what attacked them. Sensors showed massive storms within the planet's far-flung magnetosphere, where the flux bands compressed and twisted into hundred-kilometer vortices that spat out lethal particle beams. Remote satellites sent into the heart of the magnetic hurricanes revealed huge webs of chain molecule filaments, spinning for stability and manipulating the planetary magnetic field. Santa Chico had discovered how to create ephemeral energy cannon on a titanic scale. They weren't even purpose-built. As the fleet found out later, the webs were simple induction systems to power orbital craft and microgee station facilities. Turning them into weapons was just a matter of reprogramming.

When the starships did reach parking orbit, the satellites couldn't find any major cities on the planet. There were just large towns like Roseport on the existing settlement areas. They did find thousands of smaller towns and villages, all with identical pearl-white buildings. And there didn't seem to be a datapool, at least nothing the fleet could link into. Which meant there was no central government to receive Z-B's legal claim for asset realization. The flipside of that was it left them unable to deliver a warning about the gamma soak threat Not that they knew where to gamma soak to intimidate the locals.

It gave everyone a foretaste of future events.

For Lawrence the defining moment had come when he waded ashore from the drop glider. They'd aimed for a broad lake that ran along the side of Roseport, one of the first settlements. On the final approach the drop glider's forward camera had shown them a smear of white houses almost engulfed by brilliant emerald vegetation. The place resembled a Greek fishing town embracing the stony slopes that led away from the water.

Roseport might have been built by humans originally, but the new-natives who occupied it now were no longer thoroughbreds. Bipeds, tripeds, quadrupeds, even serpentine organisms, were ranged on the open ground between the buildings and the lake; they were mammalian, reptilian, equine, canine, simian, hulking things that didn't fit any terrestrial classification. Each of them had retained a few human elements—hands, limb joints, facial composition, even hair in the form of manes and plumes—but that was all. Most had a kind of segmented exoskeleton, a dark amber shell as flexible as thick rubber. Some had developed entirely new types of hides.

The Skins stood in silence just above the shore in a long line, staring up at the city's inhabitants as a variety of eyes and sonic pulses stared back.

"Who the fuck are they?" Ntoko asked as he crossed himself.

He should have known.

The Santa Chico settlement and investment company had been formed out of some very specific companies on Earth, those that relished challenge and tackled it with a bravura lack of orthodoxy. The majority came from one location.

Always a technology leader, California attracted the smartest researchers and entrepreneurs to its cutting-edge companies, most of which were moderately unconventional. Money excused a great deal, allowing them to live almost entirely as they pleased provided nobody else got hurt, and the technology companies did make a great deal of money. With Hollywood as their neighbor and prime example, every combination of sexual and narcotic abuse was enthusiastically pursued, along with freewheeling households.

To start with, this hippie chic company culture was based on electronic hardware and software, spreading from the techno heartland of Silicon Valley to install factories in every urban industrial precinct. Then, with the human genome finally read, genetics and biotech began their rise to prominence. The whole nature of "outrageous behavior" began to alter. Instead of using drugs, the new lords of biotechnology experimented upon themselves. The ethical review boards that licensed their company research activities were predominantly made up of elderly advisors, many of whom had strong religious beliefs. They saw cloning as inherently evil, and altering the human norm as an unholy sin. These were not the kind of restrictions acceptable to pioneers who more often than not had a completely different set of moral values. Several areas of research went underground.

Rejuvenation was the main goal, biotechnology's holy grail. Though to that should be added enhanced body and organ functions, new and expanded senses, innovative methods of pleasure stimulation and limb redesign, among others. Athletes, professional and amateur, were keen devotees. The cosmetic applications were also hot topics; California's ultimate deity. Just as the Internet had broken down the privacy and censorship barriers fifteen years before, so the tidal wave of quasi-legal medical, genomorph and cosmetic products helped overwhelm the moral legislators.