They dominated the beach. She could see thirty of them, the smallest as large as she was, the largest four times that. They made their desultory way along the strand, picking over the detritus. Too big, too slow, too wrong. And they didn’t care about her. She meant nothing to their creeping existence. Except they didn’t even slide about like real snails. Beneath that crumpled, swept-back cone of a shell there were greyish legs, like fingers. As though the snail was a hand nestled into that great stony shell like an obscene hermit crab. Mostly they stayed low, and only the stumps of their fingertips were visible, broad about as Lena’s thigh. But she’d seen them move. She’d seen the bastards hustle, from a standing start and without any obvious cause. They lifted their huge shells like ponderous matrons with their skirts, and those grotesque flesh limbs scuttled them along, far too fast for so huge a bulk. The sight had made her ill, when they showed her the footage. She’d hated them ever since.
But she didn’t indulge herself. She just escorted the wheeled drone as it motored over to the strand line and began selecting another round of samples from the recently beached. Back at the dome, the expedition scientists, Lena included, would do their level best to find levers amongst this alien biochemistry, to find a way to yoke it to their service. Or clear it, said the quiet voice in the back of her mind. Exterminate it, just locally. Just to give them a foothold. We came so far.
Like Bain, she’d spoken to their counterparts at the ship. People were dying. The planet was killing them. All attempts at agriculture were stillborn. People were desperate. But Lena Dal told herself that she thrived under pressure. It made her stronger. She fought back.
The sampler drones: she didn’t know what it was about the things, but the snails loved them. The expedition team had tried painting them different colours, modulating the engine frequency, signals, emissions. The monsters couldn’t resist, no matter what. They came and dismantled them, devoured parts. Not all, but only some components. Mechanisms, the computer brain, certain instruments. As though they were gourmets. She’d seen footage of that, too. The snails were hands within hands, unfolding rubbery mouthparts that were just rings of fingers over smaller fingers until the bile almost choked her.
“Incoming,” Shay said and, true to form, the closest snails had started ambling over. When they stayed low, she could almost kid herself that they were just molluscs.
“Do we, what? Give them a warning?” Orindo asked.
“Sure, go tack an eviction notice on ’em,” Lena snapped. Loud noises had been tried. No point in a warning shot. She looked around to see where the rest of the things were, because she didn’t want to get mobbed, pawed at by those horrible, unformed hands. The rest of the beachcomber population were scattered all the way down the strand line. Safe enough.
She levelled the gun and shot. Recoil compensation meant little of the kinetic kickback got to her shoulder. The snail rocked, and she saw cracks craze the whorled, stony curve of its shell. For a moment it was still, but then it just continued its dogged progress towards the sampler, intent on vandalism.
“I hope the others are capable of learning from this,” she said, and gave it another round. The superdense plastic projectile struck close on the crack and a great shard of shell was abruptly hanging away, still attached by sticky membranes and grey flesh to the thing beneath. Now the bastard stopped. Now it shuddered and its unspeakable finger-legs drummed and clawed the gritty beach. Without being told, Shay and Orindo did the same to the second, three shots sufficing to shatter its defences and leave it split open and quivering.
They were hollow, she saw. The first one had a mess of organic detritus inside it. The second . . .
Sampler parts. She stared. They’d been there a while, weirdly patinaed, layered over as though becoming outsize alien pearls. For a moment, until she put another round into the mess, until she convinced herself otherwise and recast the memories a different way, she thought there had been an organisation to the pieces. As though the insensate brute had filed them away according to some plan.
* * *
Bain woke to find the world shaking. The lid of his pod had popped open, evacuation protocols in full swing. Uncontrollable spasms racked his limbs under the chemical onslaught of the emergency wake-up procedure.
He jackknifed up, almost fell face-first out onto the floor. There were klaxons going, panicked voices. He heard gunfire.
“What . . . ? What . . . ?” Croaking pitifully, alone in the sleep room. Above him, the curved ceiling shuddered.
Still wearing just a medical smock, he stumbled out into a corridor, almost going under the feet of three of his crew. He clawed at them. “What . . . ? What . . . ?” I’m the director. You have to tell me.
Two of them just charged off. The third, unable to shake him off, stared wild-eyed. “We have to get out!”
“What is it?” As though, if he got three sentences of briefing, he could magically make it all go away, quell the earthquake, repel the invasion.
“Bain!”
He jerked as his name was called, and the man he had hold of writhed out of his grip and ran. Turning, he saw Lena. She looked . . . She had a gun and there was blood on her, the sleeve of her exosuit torn up.
“We’re under attack, Bain,” she barked. “Get to the flier.”
“Attack?” For a moment his mind just went into free fall. Attack from the other colonists? The planet? The sound of tortured metal from nearby shocked him out of it.
“We need to get you in a suit!” Lena shouted at him. “Come on!”
Behind her, the wall of the corridor deformed, something blunt shunting determinedly against it. There was a lab on the other side of that, and he had sudden thoughts of something grown there, some experiment gone wild . . .
Lena had seen it, too. “They’re inside already,” she told him, hauling him away. “So we need to get out. Out and away, back to the ship. This was a mistake. It was all a mistake.” Up to and including coming to colonise this planet in the first place, her tone said.
“They?” Echoing her was all he could do.
“The snails!”
Impossible. But even as he thought it, even as Lena dragged him off, he saw the corridor wall split behind them, the round, ridgy prow of a shell push through it, dragged forwards on those ghoulish grey fingers.
They got to the airlock, and Lena insisted on him suiting up. Even though her own suit was torn open, her blood exposed to every alien particle that her body would so violently reject. Even though someone had jammed the airlock doors open so people could flee. That brought it home; that made it real. We’re abandoning the expedition. The whole base was contaminated by the planet, now. They’d start to sicken, soon.
If the snails don’t get us.
The flier was ahead. He saw people thronging there. One of the servitors, a nine-foot humanoid form of titanium and plastic, was patiently loading it with crates under Orindo Snapper’s direction.
“I’ve got him!” Lena was yelling. Her voice came dully to Bain through his helmet. “Just get on board! Just—!”
The snail came at them with maniac speed, surely a ton of shell and mushy body, but it was riding high, its rubbery hand of a body at full extension. People threw themselves aside and the servitor was caught by the edge of the shell, flipped end over end with a squeal of complaining electronics.