Analog SFF, September 2008 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:08:17.802000+00:00

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Short Story: INVASION OF THE PATTERN SNATCHERS

by David W. Goldman

Much of history, either biological or cultural, is an arms race. And as knowledge and abilities grow subtler and more sophisticated, so do weapons and defenses....

When he regained consciousness, Surgeon-at-Arms Roald Vik of the 3rd Armored Biomedical Brigade, Affiliated Planets Unified Defense Force, was only moderately worried by his initial view of the room. Unadorned pale-blue ceiling and walls. Institutional, glossy-surfaced armchair. On the wall opposite his bed, a curtain that he assumed covered an observation window. So: a typical jail cell.

But then he noticed the faint stinging scent, like rubbing alcohol—and his bed's railing bore an impressive control panel. Frowning, he sat up and looked over his shoulder. Though he didn't recognize the particular connectors on the wall behind him, in his brief career he'd seen enough monitor and life-support fittings to recognize the overall configuration.

But what sort of hospital bed lacked restraining straps?

Vik's apprehension increased further when he discovered an excruciatingly tender, fist-sized swelling above his right ear. Had he crash-landed?

“Ah, you're awake,” said a woman's voice from somewhere near the curtained window. Vik couldn't see a loudspeaker. But though he still had no idea why he was in a hospital, now the knowledge of his location and mission flooded back to him—for the woman had spoken in Flemish.

A bit over two centuries ago, an Affiliated Planets automated probe had discovered the world of Nieuw Vlaanderen orbiting a star about fifteen light-years from Vik's homeworld, Eiriksson. Like all human colonies, Nieuw Vlaanderen was still recovering from the Collapse; like most in this region, its recovery had lagged Eiriksson's by several generations. By the time of its discovery the planet's leading civilization had regained a technology level averaging late-eighteenth-century Europe—well behind that period in physics and engineering, though significantly ahead in chemistry and biology.

As usual in such cases, after the probe's initial reports had been received and reviewed, a message was sent instructing the probe to release a stealth depopulating agent into the planet's biosphere. The A.P. in its patient conquests sought resources and territory, not opponents; no truly civilized society, surely, would prefer the untidiness and sufferings of war.

But in the century following the agent's release, the probe failed to detect any drop in the local birth-rate. This unprecedented development, so potentially threatening to the A.P.'s longstanding strategy for expansion and regional domination, demanded urgent on-site investigation. And so sub-lieutenant Roald Vik, recently commissioned UDF Surgeon-at-Arms, was crammed into a cold-sleep pod and fired off on a seventy-year voyage to Nieuw Vlaanderen.

He could remember waking in orbit, seven decades of hypno-lessons in the probe's observations—plus copious Earth history of possible relevance, including four dialects of Flemish—still echoing in his head. He remembered reviewing update summaries from the old but still-functioning probe, which in the two hundred years since its original report had identified a number of anomalies that didn't match any previously recorded patterns of post-industrial cultural or technological development.

He'd chosen his first site to investigate. There'd

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