An Excerpt from Mickey 7
The last time anything native seriously opposed one of our landfalls was nearly two hundred years ago, and maybe fifty lights spinward from here. The beach-head Command there must have given the place a name, but these days the planet is called Roanoke. Roanoke is not what you’d call an ideal habitat. Its star is a red dwarf, and the planet itself is a tidally-locked rock with almost no axial tilt, very little water, and a thirty-one day orbital period. It’s got a hot pole on one side, where the ambient temperature rarely drops below 80C, a cold pole on the other side where it snows CO2, and a habitable strip of perpetual twilight circumscribing the planet in-between that’s maybe a thousand kilometers wide. Roanoke is an old world. Speculation is that it’s harbored life for maybe seven billion years. And all that time, everything that’s evolved there has been fighting for a toehold in that dry, wind-scoured, thousand-kilometer strip.
Apparently, bringing a few million liters of liquid water to a place like that is like bringing a giant sack of scrip to a shanty-town, because the colony wasn’t a week past landfall before things started coming after them. There were tiny little biting things that came on the wind, burrowed into any exposed skin, and brought itching rashes, then pus-filled blisters, then sepsis, then death. There were things like sand-burrowing starfish with armor-piercing fangs. They injected a necrotizing venom that killed in minutes. There were insectile things half the size of a man that shot jets of concentrated sulphuric acid from glands in their heads. Half the creatures on the planet seemed purpose-built to defeat the colony’s defenses, and though it seems obvious to us now what was going on, they never did figure it out.
Almost from day one, Command at Roanoke couldn’t keep their people alive outside the main dome for more than an hour. They lost them in ones and twos, week after week, until finally they had to start making extra copies of their Expendable just to keep their berths filled. They eventually did button the place up and try to hunker down and do some research into what was happening to them. By that time, though, something was reproducing inside the dome. Command tried a half-dozen sterilization protocols, but whatever it was, it kept coming back. By the end, the entire colony was made up of copies. The central processor kept cranking them out until it ran out of amino acids.
One of the last of the Expendables to die got at least a glimmer of the truth, just before the end. Bio had released a phage tuned to take out one of the microorganisms that was tearing them up. A resistant strain showed up six hours later. The last words in his personal log, dictated as his innards were liquefying and pouring out every orifice, were these: I am not paranoid. Someone here really is out to get me.
