Charles looked down at the dolphins as they were lowered into the water. They looked normal, apart from the handful of cybernetic linkages visible against their heads, but their behaviour was odd. Most dolphins were playful, even the ones that had been trained to work beside the Royal Marines or Special Boat Service. These… just seemed to hang in the water, waiting for the command to move. They didn’t even splash water towards the humans when they were lowered into the waves.
“They’re not human,” he said. “I find it… disturbing.”
He scowled. He’d seen humans who were more machine than men… and many other horrors, most of them perpetrated on one human by another. The Royal Marines were never dispatched to peaceful parts of the world; he’d seen looting, rape and mass slaughter, all horrible beyond imagination. Seeing dolphins turned into cyber-slaves shouldn’t have bothered him, but it did. And he honestly wasn’t sure why.
“Quite a few people do,” the Rhino said. “But, in the end, they’re not intelligent.”
Charles couldn’t disagree with that, he knew, even though it still bothered him. Human geneticists had been making proposals to uplift dolphins, chimpanzees and gorillas for the last hundred years, ever since genetic manipulation became a viable science. They’d argued that, if humanity was alone in the universe, there was no harm in creating other forms of intelligent life to stand beside their human creators. For once, the governments of Earth had acted with complete uniformity and flatly banned the process. Even Sin City and the rogue asteroid settlements upheld the ban.
But the ban didn’t preclude turning animals into cybernetic organisms.
The technology was simple enough, he knew. A human would see the world through the animal’s senses, feel what the animal felt… and be able to offer suggestions that were almost always taken as orders. There were even adventure parks where human children could ride along in an animal’s mind, despite lingering fears about what contact with non-human minds could do. Given the sheer power of modern VR technology, Charles suspected they had a point. If he ever had children, he promised himself, he was damned if they were being allowed to use VR until they were at least twenty-one.
But it still bothered him, not least because controlling animals was barely scratching the surface of the technology’s potential. Someone could plug themselves into another human’s body — there were places in Sin City where a man could be a woman for a few short hours or vice versa — or even control someone, directly, through cybernetic implants. There were even a handful of asteroid colonies where negative emotions, as defined by the founders, were carefully removed from the minds of the inhabitants. Where was the free will, Charles had asked himself more than once, if someone could be shocked every time they had a negative thought. Eventually, they would be brainwashed into compliance — or dead.
“I know,” he said. “But it only makes it worse.”
On an invisible signal, the dolphins came to life; they swam out, away from the shore, and plunged under the water. Unlike the drones, Charles knew, they wouldn’t really disturb the aliens so badly; indeed, they might mistake the dolphins for native creatures they hadn’t actually recorded yet. If humans were still recording forms of underwater life on Earth, why couldn’t the aliens have the same problem on a colony world? But it still felt wrong.
The Rhino elbowed him as they turned to walk back towards the Forward Operations Base, which had expanded rapidly in the days since their landing. “If they were human instead,” he said, “like the mermen, would it be better?”
Charles had no answer. The mermen had altered themselves to the point they could live and work underwater indefinitely, not unlike the aliens themselves. A few mermen might have been able to open communications, he suspected, but none of them had volunteered to accompany the task force. He had a private theory — and he knew that some of the researchers shared it, because it had been discussed during his training — that the genetic modifications had done something to their minds. They were no longer entirely human.
He looked over at a team of Americans setting up a plasma gun and smiled to himself. If the aliens returned to the planet before the humans were ready to leave, they’d be in for a warm reception. They now knew, thanks to the alien weapons, that they could engage targets in low orbit without problems… and, with so much space junk still up there, it would be harder for the aliens to move attack ships into orbit. But then, the aliens would probably do the same as their human foes and launch marines from a safe distance. It was a perfectly viable tactic, after all.
The Rhino grunted, then led the way into one of the trailers. Inside, twelve women sat at consoles, their heads linked to a mesh of cybernetic systems. Unlike the dolphins, they could disengage their minds at any time, although it might cost the program a dolphin if they did it at the wrong time. But then, Charles knew just what could happen if an animal died while a human mind was riding it, particularly if there were no filters in place. The human would go into neural shock and, perhaps, die.
He looked down at the women and shuddered, slightly. Their faces were hidden behind their helmets, but their bodies were twitching, as if they were swimming alongside the dolphins — and, in their minds, they were. He couldn’t help hearing faint sounds coming from below the helmets, some creepy enough to make him sweat uncomfortably. The women seemed to verge between being in pain to moaning in pleasure. Part of him felt as if he was intruding on their privacy just by listening to them.
The Rhino, for once, had nothing to say as he led Charles into the deeper part of the trailer. A large holographic display hung in front of them, showing the live feed from the dolphins in a manner that looked faintly odd. Charles pushed his concerns aside as he watched the dolphins swimming deeper and deeper under the waves, probing towards the alien settlement in a casual, almost too casual, manner.
“Interesting,” one of the Americans said. Charles glanced at him and read the Army Intelligence patch on his shoulder. “Look at that.”
Charles frowned. For a moment, there was nothing there, but seabed. It wasn’t until he’d stared at it for a long moment that… something… began to take on shape and form. It looked like a crab… no, something much larger. He couldn’t help thinking of it as a strange cross between a crab, a slug and a lobster. But it was far too large to be natural.
“It looks to be mechanical,” the intelligence officer said. “But it’s just holding position there, as if it were watching for trouble.”
“A tank, perhaps,” the Rhino said.
Charles couldn’t disagree. The aliens seemed to have stationed a number of the strange vehicles below the waves, blocking access from the shore to the underwater settlements. Did they imagine that humans would send their tanks underwater to hunt them down? It might make sense, he told himself, to a race that lived under the waves. He wondered, absently, just what evolutionary path they’d followed. Humans had crawled out of the waters long before taking on their modern form; the aliens, it seemed, had chosen to establish their factories on the surface, but not to remain there permanently.
“We may never know, unless we manage to talk to them,” the Rhino commented. He’d listened to Charles’s commentary in silence. “Maybe they devised ways to use the land before they ever set foot on it, just as we did in space.”
“It would make sense,” Charles agreed. Humanity had spent years planning the use of space before ever establishing regular flights to orbit. “But how did they even consider the possibility.”
The Rhino smirked. “No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space,” he quoted. “No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.”