He used the suit’s sensors to zoom in on the naked creatures parading across the nearest arena below. They were quad-symmetric, with four thick legs at the flared base of a sallow-colored barrel body. When they moved, it was with a rocking motion as the legs bowed and flexed along their whole length. Four arms emerged just above the legs, almost as thick as the lower limbs and moving in the same long curving motions. Morton didn’t think they had joints like elbows and knees, the whole thing was elastic. The crown sprouted a further eight appendages, four stumpy trunks with an open mouth; while between them four tall slender tendrils that ended in bulbous lumps of flesh waved about like corn in the wind.
“Solid-looking brutes,” Rob said. “There must be thousands of them down there.”
Morton gave the arenas another scan with his suit’s optical sensors. “More like tens of thousands.” He was recording the scene for the navy. The first communications wormhole was due to open in another seventeen hours; he’d be able to send them the information then. It would be interesting to see what their analysts came up with.
“They’re all fitted with a transmitter gadget, look,” Rob was saying. “I just keep getting that analogue hash coming from them.”
“Right.” Morton was watching a pair touching their long upper limbs together. An alien kiss? A fuck? “I know we’ve only just seen them, but they all look identical to me.”
Rob snorted. “Very not politically correct.”
“I was wondering if they were clones. Some kind of disposable construction crew? Just a thought. Their army might be the same. A perfect soldier replicated a hundred million times. It would explain their dire lack of tactics, all they ever do is use numbers to overrun us. They don’t mind the slaughter because they’re not losing individuals the way we are.”
“Could be. It makes as much sense as any other idea. Let’s see if we can get a closer look.”
With the sneekbots prowling ahead and behind, they began to worm their way deeper through the decaying foliage of the fallen trees. Morton could see several hundred aliens working on the long refinery station by the shore. The giant machine was still being extended. Both ends were sheathed by a network of scaffolding that supported cranes and hoists. Aliens swarmed all over the new components that were being added. They must possess an excellent sense of balance, Morton thought; he couldn’t see anything equivalent to a human handrail on the narrow metal struts that they moved along.
“Ho, did you see that?” Rob asked.
“What?”
“One of those things just took a crap off the top of the refinery station.”
Morton tracked his optical sensors along the colossal structure. Now he knew what to look for, he could easily find evidence of more casual defecation. The pipes and girders were splashed with tacky brown patches. “So? They never got around to inventing a flushable pan. The Doc was saying we need to watch out for a different philosophy more than any other type of variation between us.”
“I’m not sure that’s a question of psychology or even bad plumbing. Leaving your own waste products around like that is a very counterproductive thing for a species to do. Everyone develops disposal mechanisms, both social and practical; it’s one of the first signs of civilization emerging. You don’t just wait for the rain to wash it away.”
“You have no idea what their digestive biochemistry is like,” Morton said.
“Face it, their crap could be the perfect fertilizer.”
“Then they’d collect it and transport it to a field. No, we’re missing something. You may have been on the right track with your clone army idea.” He paused, unhappy. “Though even they wouldn’t deliberately foul their own environment. Nothing would. This doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe the clone clean-up army is due to arrive next.”
Rob chuckled. “You want to put some money on that?”
“No way.”
After another half hour of cautious movement through the moldering forest, they had moved as far west as they could go before risking open ground. The fallen trees had also brought them to within six hundred meters of the force field protecting the alien town. They sent a trio of sneekbots on ahead, but stayed under cover of the sopping wood as the invisible sun finally fell below the horizon.
“Another difference,” Rob said.
“What?”
“There’s no color on anything they build, no finish or decoration. All the external material is raw.”
“They’re color blind as well.”
“And immune to esthetics?”
“Okay, then. You tell me.”
“I don’t know why, I’m just pointing it out. Their culture has no art.”
“Have you seen the crap flooding the unisphere these days?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but don’t forget this is a military invasion base. It’s bound to be functional.”
“Could be. What do you make of the setup?”
Morton switched his attention back to the alien activities below him. The angle just allowed him a narrow view along the front of the refinery station. Machinery and tightly packed pipes produced a metal precipice fifty meters high. It was lined with wide orifices that were pumping out torrents of liquid. He counted sixteen of the big jets squirting bilious foaming water out into the lake shallows.
“I guess we know what resource they were after when they came here,” Rob said. “The lake itself.”
“What the hell is that stuff?” Morton wondered. Lights on the top of the refinery station cast a bright illumination across the shallows. The aliens had done a lot of work along the shoreline. Long concrete ramps now extended out into the water, reaching almost to the force field, a kilometer and a half away. In between them, the lake had been divided up into a number of pens by heavy netting. Morton realized there were a lot more ripples in the pens than there were out beyond the force field. Yet there couldn’t be any breeze inside the shielding. He zoomed in for a clearer look at whatever was stirring the water.
The pens were filled with some kind of living creatures. A lot of living creatures. It was their writhing forms thrashing about just below the surface that was causing all the disturbance.
“They’re bioforming the planet,” he said. “That’s what this station is, that’s why they wanted the lake. Jesus.”
“You might be right,” Rob said. “They’ve certainly got big-scale expansion plans. Access sneekbot three-oh-six.”
When 306’s sensor feed flipped up into Morton’s virtual vision he saw the little machine had crept right up to the force field. The first reading was the strength of the field. They didn’t have anything that could penetrate, it was even strong enough to withstand the tactical nukes they’d brought. He concentrated on the excavation that the aliens were making a hundred meters inside the boundary, clawing out a deep bunker that they were lining with concrete and metal. A tower of machinery was being assembled in the center. The Doc had been right: technological solutions did refine machines down to identical functions. Morton recognized some of the sections without having to reference his e-butler. The aliens were building a force field generator.
“Track right,” Rob said.
He swiveled 306’s antenna buds: six hundred meters away, another generator bunker was being dug out.
“Those generators are a lot more powerful than the ones they’re using now,” Rob said. “At this rate it’s only going to take a couple of days to finish them. After that, they’ll be truly impregnable, and we’ll be truly screwed.”