Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

We continued on our way, and soon found ourselves at the foot of the ramp. There, we found the two soldiers who'd gone ahead, and two others that were clearly the wealthy tourists Mead had mentioned.

I walked up to them and inspected them both under the bright glare of the room's light. They were both heavily modified, but in different styles than their parents. One of them had almost featureless skin of a ghostly salmon color, and patches of coarse, almost pebbled skin in radial lines that narrowed as they converged on the bridge of his nose from jaw, cheeks, and hairline. He was also caked in translucent mud that was somewhere between grey and yellow in color. He stood about two and a half meters tall, as one of the soldiers might do out of his armor, but without the massive build universally displayed by the soldiers. He was regarding me with a contemptuous, bored look. His playmate was of indeterminate sex, having muscles and curves in strange places. Some kind of heavy modification for fun or sports or the Goddess only knew what. That one, too, looked supremely bored under a thick caking of mud. The might have been anywhere from ten to forty years old; spoiled rich children.

"So what is this," the male asked, "we disturb your little science project?"

I so wanted to smash that tone out his voice, but knew that the wealthy kid would probably have loaded himself up with combat training and doubtless had the plenty enough disregard for human life to use it if I did anything. I snarled at him, and said, "Not our science project, you pathetic little fool. Someone else's science project altogether. Don't you know where you are?"

He gave me a bored shrug, and said, "Look, I wanna go catch some rays."

The soldier standing behind placed a huge armored hand on the kid's shoulder, without saying a word. The kid grimaced and tried to shake off the hand, without success. I turned back to have a look at what Alain Hu had discovered.

The man was crouching next to one of the stalks, and was busily scanning the thing. Mead, standing about three meters away, was attaching a small mask to his suit. As I watched, he activated the mask, and the boxy eyepiece that made up the upper half suddenly bulged outward. I shook my head in wonder at what he was looking for.

"Anything interesting?" I asked the exobiologist.

The man dumbly nodded in response. I tried to glance at the display on his sensor, but there wasn't one. It was all OHUD, I supposed.

"Well?" I prompted.

"Hatchlings, of course," he muttered, "but already ready to feed. You were right about the idea of an incubator; that's just what this place was. I should have known when I went through here two years ago."

He turned the scanner on the mud that was covering his boots to the toes, and added, "These things are a juvenile stage of something much, much bigger."

"Oh yeah?" I stared up at the tree analogs with new respect. "How big are the adults! They must be record-setters."

A new thought occurred to me. "Hmm! Any percentage in that?" I asked.

Instead of answering, Hu said, "It seems that the mud has been pretty much depleted of the food stuffs you mentioned. It's mostly just some minerals and maybe some waste matter. Yes, these things have been digesting something, all right."