Jamie says that people go grass crazy sometimes. Not the teams, they’re too well-trained. But sometimes it’s someone who just arrived on Hella and who can’t adjust. One day, they walk outside, climb over or under or through the fence, walk out into the stuff and disappear. It’s the grass, the tall smothering stiffgrass. It always wins. Knock it down, it comes back. Burn it, it comes back. The grass is forever.
People who’ve never been out in the grass don’t get it. I didn’t understand what Jamie was talking about until I stood in the middle of a furrow, looking around at this very narrow world, a shadow valley with only a bright strip of sky above to remember there’s a horizon somewhere. I didn’t want to stumble into a gigantic footprint. It would be a fearsome reminder that something monstrous made this the topless tunnel. If I walked far enough I’d find it. And if I went the other way, following backward from the footprints, I’d be just as likely to find something even worse, something large and hungry creeping up the channel from behind.
But Captain Skyler says you have to get down on the ground to understand. After you know how hard it is for the Rollagons to push through the stiffgrass, then you can start to imagine how big and how powerful an animal would have to be to push through by itself. It’s not that any individual stalk of grass is resistant. One at a time, they’re just a little crunchy. But when you shove against the whole bulk of all that yellow straw, it builds up into a big stubborn mass. Sometimes the grass is so stiff and dry we have to put laser cutters on the lead vehicle, but even that’s a problem because by the end of the summer the grass is so dry it catches fire. That’s why we mostly use the big rollers to crush it, and the trucks travel single file.
One time, a team nearly did incinerate themselves until they could get upwind of the blaze, but that happened before I was born. That’s when the water-filled rollers were added to the front of the Rollagons. Now if it happens, we can use the water in the rollers to put out any fire we might start. Except now we’re a lot more careful. There’s still so much to learn about Hella.
By 1800 the sun was at its peak, and the temperatures outside were rising uncomfortably. We stopped to release the second shift of drones and retrieve the first shift for detoxing. We couldn’t risk them picking up Hellan microbes, and we try to minimize the risk of spreading our own. We know we can’t, but we can’t be careless either.
We were deep into the migration path now and in another week this would be one of the most dangerous places on the planet, the saurs were coming, thousands of them—but sometimes there were loners pushing ahead and we had to watch out for them. We’d planted over a hundred sensors this morning, drilling them deep into the ground at regular intervals. Maybe half of them would survive the ramming this terrain was about to experience, but we needed the monitoring.
The thing is—as dangerous as Hella can be, sometimes it’s us, the invaders, who are even more dangerous. Jamie says we’re the most dangerous species on the planet. Especially to each other. That’s what happened on Earth and if we’re not careful, it’ll happen again here. Jamie didn’t figure that out for himself. He was telling me what he overheard Captain Skyler say about Councilor Layton, Marley’s dad. Mom doesn’t like the Councilor for a different reason. She thinks he’s a bad parent.
Captain Skyler ordered the trucks into a starfish shape, back ends touching, noses pointed outward. “Four hour nap,” he ordered. “Three on watch in each truck.” He pointed at me. “You take first watch port side. Wake Sergeant Orion in an hour. Call me if anything larger than a lizard farts.”
I climbed up into the port side turret and settled myself in a huge comfortable observation couch, way too big for me. I had to adjust the back and foot rests. The display in front of me showed a 360-degree view, spread out in a horizontal strip with the rear view split at the edges. All the trucks were linked together, so the image was a correlated composite, high dynamic range, overlaid with augments and readouts. I could scan the horizon at various magnifications, and I could slide the image right or left across the display to look closer at any part of the surrounding terrain, but it all looked the same. Just a flat sea of rippling yellow waves. Nothing else was moving that I could see. Nothing was moving in the infra-red either. No heat signatures.
I did see a few hoppers perched on a nearby rise. They took turns, lifting themselves up, standing erect to look around, their long snouts pointing and sniffing. You can tell how old a hopper is by the color of its fur. The pups are brownish, the adults fade to yellow and eventually some color that isn’t white or pink or anything else, but it is bright. Every few minutes, one or another would notice us. It would stiffen and stand tall on its hind legs. Its head crest puffing up tall, a warning I guess. Then all the hoppers would peer out into the distance, ears wide, noses wiggling. After a bit, the first one’s crest would flatten, the ears would droop, and most of the others would drop back down and resume digging for whatever it was that hoppers dig for. Insects and grubs probably. If they could find a nest, the whole family would eat.
The hoppers were a good sign. Hoppers will leave the savannah long before the migration passes through, probably as soon as they feel the first ground-tremblings or hear the saurs’ subsonic grumbles or maybe just smell the first smells. Or maybe something else. All of our different monitors showed the main bulk of the herd was still over a hundred klicks away, but in ten days or less, all this tall grass would be flattened to a sodden mess by hundreds of giant feet. Maybe thousands.
The herd would spend a day or two at the Big Muddy River drinking and wallowing, consuming and regurgitating, flushing their systems, cleaning themselves inside and out—and also widening the river channel even more. They’d drink up tens of thousands of gallons of sluggish brown water and piss half of it back into what would end up as a slowly rolling syrup. Downstream of the crossing, the water would reek for weeks.
Then, as they moved eastward again, they’d continue pissing and crapping, poisoning the present but fertilizing the future. They’d leave an ugly brown swath wide enough to be seen from space, and the plain would stink even more than the river, but the land would be rejuvenated and the winter grass would flourish for a few weeks until the ice storms swept down from the north.
But before the storms arrived, most everyone at Summerland would have evacuated south to Winterland, leaving only a maintenance team in place. Winterland Station was on the dry southern shore of the continent. It was cold and windy, but it wasn’t buried under ten meters of snow on a good day and thirty on the worst.
I noticed a smudge of dust on the horizon. A cloud? Maybe. I zoomed in for a closer look. I couldn’t tell. Too much haze in the air. I sent the nearest drone to loop around. From above, the view was just as vague. Haze or cloud or maybe something else? I frowned at the screen. Was this bigger than a lizard fart? I had to go deeper into the noise to find out.
I told the drone to swoop in lower, but not too low. All that dust didn’t necessarily mean there was something underneath. It could have been a windspout, something that aspired to be a tornado when it grew up. I switched to infrared, maybe there was a heat signature. Not enough. Hard to tell at midday when everything was hot. Okay, one other thing to try—scan for a tag. Not every animal was chipped, we didn’t have the resources, but we did track the biggest troublemakers. Finally, I asked the drone to show me any odor trails hanging in the air. It was unlikely, but sometimes you get lucky.