It was with deep regret that the crew had been forced to use potentially lethal force against the Brutes, as this was strictly against the guidelines of the Colonisation and Exploration Program. Although they attempted to use such force only as and when necessary to safeguard their lives, they knew that one or two of the natives had died, or had certainly been seriously wounded. After all, their weapons were designed to kill, so it was little wonder that some died at the inexpert hands of the crew who were not highly trained in their use.
Their task had been simply to locate and identify a host planet where their few remaining people could set up a colony with a view to living in harmony with existing life forms, culminating in a joint existence that would benefit all.
There was no way they could live in harmony with these creatures. The wild beasts were simple to deal with, as already they had identified the predators and those who would kill to defend their young, but in the main the prime concern was this dominant species of mammal. For a start, they looked gruesome, they didn’t follow the same genetic pattern as the crew, and they seemed hell bent of destroying anything they didn’t understand.
Initially categorised as barely intelligent, it was this intelligence that turned out to be the most fearful, as the brutes learned surprisingly quickly. For example, they now knew the crew’s hand weapons had an effective range of only fifty paces. After the first few occasions when the crew had used the weapons, the brutes rarely came closer than that range. Instead, they would hide and try to ambush the crew at any moment. Their ability to blend with their surroundings terrified the crew, as did their accuracy with the lengths of pointed sticks used as javelins
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Heera.
“What?” asked the other two in unison.
“Looking like them. I mean, how hard can it be?”
“Well, apart from the fact they’re taller than us, have a completely different skeletal structure, have unnatural gender configurations and all that fur,” said Jay Bee
“It’s not fur,” declared Heera.
“It looks like fur.”
“It’s hair.”
“Now you’re splitting hairs,” chuckled Jay Bee.
Heera threw an empty carton at Jay Bee who ducked and laughed all the more.
“I think the answer is in our weapons,” Heera said, serious once more.
“Our weapons, how?” asked Kayra
“Well, I’m not the engineer, so you’ll have to ask Graton, but I think the principle of Matter Disruption is the key.”
“I don’t see it, unless you want to blast holes in all those creatures. I think we’d need a hell of a lot more weapons.”
“Okay, what little I remember from my science class, matter disruption is an off-shoot of matter transformation, isn’t it?”
“Possibly, go on.”
“Well, each of our blasters has a small reactor and a projector. The reactor creates and stores the energy and the projector simply discharges it, focussing the energy in a fashion designed to kill or disable the target. What would happen if you take out the reactor and, instead of attaching it to a projector, configure a transformer that transforms our physical shape to be more in keeping with the local aborigines?”
The other two stared at Heera with astonishment. Jay Bee started to laugh, but cut it short when he became aware that Kayra wasn’t laughing.
“I’m not sure it would be that easy, but you’ve possibly got something there. Go get Graton, and we’ll see if we can rig up something.”
Kayra was right; it wasn’t easy. Indeed, it took Graton, aided by all the others, a further six weeks to rig up a prototype that was too heavy to lift, let alone carry. But it worked, sort of.
The science was complicated, but based on the principle that all matter comprised of atoms, then once those atoms were identified and coded, then the power of the matter transformer could reconfigure any one atom to appear as another. This could work for one minute particle, or a series of particles that comprised a larger form, like a body.
The prototype was configured to a small mammal that they’d caught in a trap. Once initiated, they managed to change the appearance of the mammal into that of a fish, taking as a model another specimen that floated morosely in a small glass tank. The new fish then exploded, spreading intestines and goo all over the small laboratory on the ship.
“Shit!” said Graton with some feeling.
“It worked,” pointed out Kayra, wiping some slimy stuff from her face.
“Not for any length of time, I think the power needs to be turned down a little.”
“You should have put it in a tank of water,” suggested Heera.
“Then the mammal would have drowned before the change took place. I think we ought to limit it to similar species. It had to alter the DNA and I think that might have been the root of the problem.”
“Can you make the device smaller?” Kayra asked.
“How much smaller?” asked Graton.
“Small enough for us to carry, like a time piece or similar?”
“If I had a fully equipped lab like I had back home, maybe. Here, I very much doubt it.”
“Then we’re wasting time. Unless you can design something that we can carry unobtrusively, then we may as well not bother.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Oh, and how different are the brutes’ DNA compared to ours?”
“Without taking a sample from a captured specimen, it’s difficult to say. We have sampled some blood from that incident where we almost got killed, but there wasn’t very much. From the little we got, they’re not as different as our external differences would suggest,” the scientist said. “In fact, we’re closer to them than the fish was to that small mammal.”
“That’s encouraging, I think,” muttered Kayra.
“The main problem is that of gender.”
“You mean because they have only two and they’re permanent?”
“Exactly.”
“I can’t imagine having to exist as one gender for the whole of my life. It doesn’t seem fair that only fifty percent of the race ever experience the joys of childbirth.”
“As someone once told me, whoever said life was fair?” Graton said.
“Why do we need to align ourselves so closely to the brutes, can’t we just make ourselves similar enough to pass?”
“They’re extraordinarily astute, for savages. They’ll spot any differences and before you can react, they’ll attack. From what we’ve seen, even if they see other brutes just like themselves, they still attack first and then ask questions later. No, we have to be able to literally become like them, even down to the DNA. Once we get to that stage, we have to work on gaining the trust of a small group.”
“This is too much. The Colonial Administration would not stand for this on such a scale. Our people can’t live like this. We would be better employed leaving here and seeking an alternative world.”
“Or wiping out the brutes, that’d solve the problem,” said Jay Bee.
“No it wouldn’t. We’d have their death on our conscience and all our laws forbid it.”
“It wouldn’t bother me,” admitted Jay Bee. “They’re ghastly creatures, and don’t deserve this wonderful planet. If we leave them, they’ll ruin it in a few years and probably make themselves and everything else extinct.”
“I’m not sure another planet is out there, but I agree, logistically it’s a nightmare. However, if we could find a small part of this planet that is free from the brutes, we could set up an isolated colony and develop to such a stage that we need not fear them. By the time they spread that far, we would be numerically and technologically superior, and they would have to live in harmony with us.”
“Or be destroyed,” the captain said.
“Possibly, but you know how sensitive the Colonial Administration is about genocide. No, we’d have to be patient and just grow quietly without any contact with them.”