Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

“Human, you underestimate the forces ranged against you. We are over a thousand strong. And we are hungry. We demand that you give over your food and fresh water. We’ll leave you with a day’s supply of each. With this food of yours, we can feed our survivors in the command area for a week. Our metabolism utilizes food resources much more efficiently than the human metabolism. The human metabolism is a wasteful thing.”

She was galled by the alien’s hubris. “And this is a reason I should give you all our food?”

“In an absolute moral sense, yes, it is. It’s better that you keep more individuals alive longer than a few individuals alive for a shorter period of time.”

“And you’re the experts on absolute moral sense?”

“When creatures such as yourselves fail to see reason—and we will admit that we ourselves failed to see just how vastly reasonless your psychology is—it is incumbent upon us, as the more advanced society, to try to teach you what is just and right.”

“So murder is just and right. You see these girls here? They’re orphans. And they’re orphans because of you.”

“That was a choice you made for yourself. Human, I give you this opportunity to save yourself. We are by nature negotiators. We have proven this to you over the last nine years. We are not fighters.”

“No. You simply put us all in a big plankton bag and watch us fight each other.”

“It is you who choose to fight. Cooperation would have gotten you much further. Cooperation is the model for all other civilized worlds, and a model we mistakenly assumed for you. Yet you are creatures of choice, just as all creatures are. Don’t blame others for the choices you have made.”

“You’re trespassing on the property of Dr. Neil Thorndike. Does that name mean anything to you?”

A pause as the translator did its thing, and then, “Yes.”

“Dr. Thorndike has died, and all his property has passed to me.”

It took the Tarsalan a moment, but finally, through his translation thing, he said, “Ah, yes…his last will and testament. We don’t have such customs where I come from.”

“Do you understand what trespass means?”

“The human sense of it is slightly different than the Tarsalan one. And there is no concept or word for property in any of our languages.” The word property popped out in English. “Or in our various cultures. But it is a concept that is obviously deeply ingrained on Earth.”

“Then let me give you some advice… Tarsalan .” She hit the word hard. “Get off my property before I kill you.”

She lifted the Montclair and pointed it straight at him. He shifted, took a step backward, and his pupils shrank to such a small size that she could hardly see them.

“My child, shoot me if you wish…but you have already signed your own death writ. We outnumber you more than a hundred to one. What can you possibly do to stop us?”

And Glenda realized that, yes, they weren’t really so smart after all.

She watched them go. She felt sorry for them. The Cameron Chess Study was one thing, and Tarsalans might win against humans again and again in a situation where all the moves were circumscribed by game rules—indeed, all the negotiations with the Tarsalans had possessed a gamelike quality, and she remembered how all of Kafis’s actions seemed to be predicated on a kind of rarefied and arcane games theory—but there were no rules when it came to war, especially human war. There was only brutality.

She waited for Fernandes to get back, then told him her plan. “Let’s get the kerosene. Jake, help us.”

They went into the cave’s second chamber and retrieved five big cans of kerosene, a primitive fuel that Lenny had had the foresight to stash away “For when our batteries fail.” The wind was strong, though it changed direction often, and would act like a bellows. The forest was tinder-dry and would go up like a torch. Eight hundred and seventy thousand acres, all of it dead, providing the necessary combustibles to make her own firestorm.

They poured the fuel in great ribbons of vaporous liquid, venturing into the forest, down the hill, up the hill, until they had dumped every last ounce of kerosene into the brush. Then Glenda got the box of safety matches, scratched one along the side, and, keeping it shielded from the wind with her hand, lit the nearest bush. The flames ignited with a voracious ripple, and spread so fast she hardly had time to leap back.

Ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, and the size of the conflagration grew alarmingly. Tongues of flame leaped yards into the air; she took glory in how bright everything was. She could see ! The glow of the fire bathed her eyes with soul-refreshing illumination. All four kids looked on in fascination. She knew that somewhere out there in the dead forest the Tarsalans looked on as well. She thought they were feeling dread in their hearts, and that they were oozing the thick, musty odor they oozed whenever they were terrified.

The heat of the fire became too much for Glenda, Fernandes, and the kids, and they retreated into the cave, where it was cool and damp, and where a faint wind blew up from the bowels of the Earth, forcing smoke away from the cave entrance.

There they stayed as the firestorm raged around them. Glenda wasn’t without guile when it came to the Tarsalans. Maybe they had an ingenious way of putting out the fire. Maybe they would just get in their TLVs and take off. Some ash drifted in through the cave entrance and landed on her foot. Then again, maybe, as with the attack on the mothership, and ultimately on the phytosphere control device itself, they would be caught unawares. They would see this fire, and they would get another lesson in how humans behaved, especially when they had nothing left to lose.

The following day Gerry and Ian eased away from the Phobos-Deimos Terminal, and Ian established a transit orbit toward Earth. He engaged thrusters three and one. The singularity drives showed no malfunction and Ian risked full power.

Four days later, the Earth-Moon system hove into view over the craggy nose of Gaspra. The phytosphere was a festering green cancer around Gerry’s home planet, thicker than he had ever seen it, and he momentarily wondered if it would be enough—the shift of the Moon two thousand miles closer to Earth—but then decided it would, knew that he couldn’t have been wrong in his calculations.

For a brief while, as they got closer, an automated Tarsalan probe, egg-shaped like most of the alien craft and wrapped in its own shimmering plasma of blue, violet, and pink light, orbited the asteroid, but the PCV’s scans told them it was unweaponized, unmanned, and posed no threat.

“I’m sure they’ve exhausted all their military capability by this time,” said Ian. “Looks like we’re home free, buddy.”

All that needed to be done now was fire Drive Five. This would initiate the slight change of angle needed for the final impact, and bring Gaspra crashing into the lunar surface.

But when Ian tried the modified key box, it was as if the alien virus had at last worked through to his initial fix and he got no response from thrust conduit number five. In other words, the drive that had given them their initial trouble previous to mission countdown was again flickering into the red. Ian maneuvered from his seat over to the navigation console and his fingers clicked over the keys, but he couldn’t regain command of the conduit, nor secure access through some creative rerouting.

He worked frantically on the problem for the next five minutes. Gerry glanced nervously out the big freighter windows and saw the Earth, like a rotting wedge of lime, and the Moon, craters now fully visible.