The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF: Volume 3 by David Afsharirad

Author:David Afsharirad [Afsharirad, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625795823
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2017-06-05T21:00:00+00:00

Cold, crisp, the air tasted oddly like a fruit flavored gum from back home. He’d been more than a little leery of stepping outside without a helmet, but Moira called him a pussy. A pussy! A damn computer shouldn’t be able to talk to a decorated veteran like that. Sure, there was enough oxygen to keep him alive here, but what if the plant extinction had something to do with an airborne pathogen?

Moira reminded him that whatever killed off the plants hadn’t harmed anything else. The insects were still alive.

So off he went with Roy, but he still wore his combat suit and carried a maglev rifle. Damned if he would let a smartass computer shame him into getting killed. He tried to keep his combat edge, but the three-mile walk through gorgeous flora eventually had him admiring his surroundings. Sweet smelling tube flowers at least two feet across, their petals every color combination Jensen’s brain could process, and some it couldn’t, with yellow stamens thicker than his arm. More plants no higher than his ankle with flowers the size of his pinkie nail. He let Roy range ahead and mark his new territory. And the dog had a lot to mark. Trees and vines arched up into a canopy that displayed its own rainbow of fruits above Jensen’s head. Which the millions of bugs here put to good use. Making more bugs.

The combat suit generated a mild electromagnetic field that kept the bugs away, but pretty soon Jensen didn’t have to worry about it. When he reached the edge of the jungle, he noticed the insects seemed to stay behind an invisible line about three feet back from the last plants.

As seed planet catastrophes go, this one didn’t seem too bad. Looked like they just got the mixture of early insects wrong. Sometimes the smart boys back home guessed wrong. The genetic alterations made to plants that grew under this bluish light could very well have made them tasty to an insect that would otherwise ignore them. But what the hell did a grunt know about those things? He was just here to take samples and report back. The clean, straight line of demarcation had Jensen feeling antsy, though. What insect ate everything in a perfect line like that? Space locusts?

The rich soil where the jungle stopped appeared churned up, as if a well-disciplined platoon of wild hogs had come through here. But Seed World Four-Seven-Alpha had no life bigger than a dragonfly before Jensen and Roy arrived. The introduction of larger species had to be carefully controlled over decades to ensure a stable food chain.

Jensen selected a silver tube off his belt and knelt to scoop up a soil sample. He’d let Moira do all the brainwork.

Ping-ping!

The motion alert on his suit made Jensen snap to his feet. A vibration on his upper left chest pointed him toward whatever set off the sensor. Not Roy. Judging from the sound of crashing underbrush and snapping branches, the dog was exploring the jungle about fifty feet to his right.

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