Chapter 7

The Marinkos spent almost four months training their infantry in the proper use of the machine pistols. They did have a small problem with finding men strong enough to handle the recoil of the machine pistols, but that problem was solved and they moved in on Illin to wipe out the last of the wolves. Meanwhile, the people of the city had been moved away to other cities to make room for the upcoming fight.

Surprise, surprise! The dire wolves had moved on to other locals in search of food. There were now four dire wolves roaming reasonably close to Illin, but not in the city, and these wolves had to be tracked down the hard way. Two of the wolves were pregnant females, so that added a sense of urgency to the search for the remaining wolves.

It turned out that the 2,000 troops trained in the use of the machine pistols were just not enough to do the foot by foot search of the vicinity of Illin. Regular infantry had to be brought in to help with the search. In the end, the Marinkos worked out an arrangement where the search details were reduced to three men in each. One of them had a machine pistol and the other two had the standard infantry rifle in .22 caliber.

The plan was that the two regular soldiers would simply help in the search, but the man with the machine pistol was responsible for killing the dire wolf once it was found. The great sigh of relief from their headquarters was nearly enough to disturb the atmosphere when the first dire wolf killed was a female. It took almost five months to get rid of the rest of the dire wolves, and this year of turmoil was enough to teach the Marinkos a lesson in manners. There were no more “practical jokes” inflicted upon the rest of the galaxy!

Back at Headquarters, when the Marinkos promised through diplomatic channels that there would be no more jokes, our unit was assembled for a special presentation of the most prestigious medal the Galactic Rangers had to offer. In a ceremony televised all over the galaxy and watched by trillions of people, we were awarded the Galactic Honors Medal. The only problem was that too many politicians made speeches lasting too long, but this was an opportunity that came all too rarely for them to ignore it. Oh, well...

Fortunately for our own peace of mind, the big deal did not last too long. We were slotted into the regular assignment system, and that meant that we were soon out in the field working on preparing the planet Ginso for occupation. Since this was the first such assignment for our group, we were assigned to what was believed to be a routine job. Unfortunately, nobody had bothered to tell the planet of Ginso that little gem of information.

We were dropped onto Ginso with the standard kit for this sort of job. As I expected, all five of the newcomers checked their personal replicator for damage as their first activity upon landing. Okay, the replicators came through with flying colors, so we settled into the normal line of business.

The first thing we were supposed to do was to check to be sure that there were no fauna that would be too tough for the incoming settlers to face. Of course, there had been a standard survey to make sure that there were no sentient beings who would be discommoded by an invasion of new settlers. This was done by machine, but the test for non-sentient fauna was to be done by us with our feet on the ground.

None of the flora was obviously harmful, and none of it was mobile as far as the drones could tell, so we were advised to concentrate on the fauna and record data on the flora in passing. I didn’t argue with that order of priorities because that was what my animal-based senses told me to expect.

Most of Ginso was covered by water, about 80%, and that was not expected to be a real problem for the first settlers whom we were geared up to protect. If there were problems in the oceans and/or large lakes, they would be handled by a separate group that would come in only if they were requested. This routine had worked well for the settling of over 12,000 new planets, so we were all quite ready to believe that it would apply to us.

The land area of Ginso was mostly flat plain and rolling hills, though there were a few low mountains. The majority of tectonic activity had already happened thousands of years earlier, so nothing special was expected to show up now. I ask you, how complacent can a bureaucracy get?

We had been on Ginso 11 days and were still operating under the belief that we had the straight story on what to expect of Ginso. Hunter and Moon were using two of our fliers to survey the plains for animals not reported by the initial drone scan. In essence, they were looking for fauna above a minimum size, specifically the size of a common house cat. Their craft were equipped with sensors that were absolutely reliable—definitely believable even if they were in conflict with the official word from Headquarters. So far, they were showing nothing beyond what the original drones had reported.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were investigating a band of forest that ran from ocean to ocean that was on the order of 300 miles wide centered on the equator. So far, we were ignoring the ice sheets at the poles.

We were also flying simply because the forest below us would be called a jungle by a casual observer. The undergrowth was so thick that it was totally impractical for us to try to walk on the ground. Our fliers were the same type as were being used by Hunter and Moon, and we were flying about 30 feet above the top of the leaf canopy.

We had been concentrating on the northern hemisphere of Ginso, so we thought that we knew what that hemisphere was like. As it happened, Snow was flying the northern edge of our sweep, and she was the first one to notice a problematic situation. We were using our personal AIs for communication, so I was startled by a blast from her. [OJIF, COME HERE QUICK! YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS!]

[Snow, don’t shout over the AI link. It makes no difference in the range of the contact, and it is painful if it is not expected. Okay, I am on my way.]

[I’m sorry, Ojif, but I was so excited by what I was seeing that I forgot. Please hurry so that you won’t miss it.]

I was about 100 miles away from Snow, so it took me over an hour to get to her. She was circling an area of about a mile radius, which was the minimum for these fliers if one wanted to keep from straining their structural integrity. I had no trouble finding what she was so excited about. When I saw the creatures, I called in Sunshine and Tracker so that they could also see what had so excited Snow.

The creature was a worm, for lack of a better word, that was a good 35 feet in diameter and over 300 feet long. Where it had burst from the ground was also easy to spot: it was a hole in the bottom of a crater about 50 feet deep and 75 feet in diameter. If one disregarded its size, admittedly something very hard to do, the worm looked like any other worm. To the uneducated like us, there was no obvious head nor tail, just rounded off ends at the extremes of the creature.

Logic said that this worm rarely came to the surface because it had not been spotted by the original drones or by us, so why was it showing itself now? Snow and I circled the worm until Sunshine and Tracker showed up. We had not been wasting our time because we had been photographing the worm and the hole it made in considerable detail. We had both 2d and 3d pictures that any worm aficionado would drool over.

The two new arrivals only had a few seconds to look at the worm before a great rumbling was heard in the distance. All four of us climbed higher to see what was the cause of the noise. Tracker was the first to spot the cause of the noise. [Ojif, look over to the northwest. It looks to me like Ginso is breaking in half!]

Tracker was right. There was a large crack in the surface of the plain, and the crack was rushing in our direction. The worm could not see the crack from its position, but it took off over the surface heading northeast. That was a sensible thing to do, because the crack was headed toward the worm’s former position at close to 150 MPH, and it did not seem to be slowing down. I sent Tracker and Snow to photograph the progress of the crack while Sunshine and I headed back toward the trees.