SNAFU: Unnatural Selection Read online

  Table of Contents

  HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

  Dave Beynon

  Unborn

  Justin Bell

  The Weavers in Darkness

  James A Moore & Charles R. Rutledge

  Kill Team Kill

  Justin A Coates

  RESTLESS

  Lee Murray

  A Hole in the World

  Tim Lebbon & Christopher Golden

  Cargo

  B. Michael Radburn

  Vermin

  Richard Lee Byers

  The Valley of Death

  David Amendola

  Venom

  Michael McBride

  SNAFU: UNNATURAL SELECTION

  Publisher’s Note:

  This book is a collection of stories from writers all over the world.

  For authenticity and voice, we have kept the style of English native to each author’s location, so some stories will be in UK English, and others in US English.

  We have, however, changed dashes and dialogue marks to our standard format for ease of understanding.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction.

  All people, places, events, mutations, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  SNAFU:

  Unnatural Selection

  Edited by Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown

  Cohesion Press

  Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum

  Beechworth , Australia

  2015/2018

  SNAFU: Unnatural Selection

  Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown(eds)

  2018 REISSUE

  ebook - 978-0-9944286-8-4

  Print - 978-0-9946304-2-1

  Anthology © Cohesion Press 2016

  Stories © Individual Authors 2016

  Cover Art © Dean Samed 2016

  Interior Art © Monty borror 2016

  Internal Layout by Cohesion Editing and Proofreading

  Set in Palatino Linotype

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cohesion Press

  Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum

  Beechworth, Australia

  www.cohesionpress.com

  Also From Cohesion Press

  Horror:

  SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  SNAFU: Heroes

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  SNAFU: Hunters

  – eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown

  SNAFU: Future Warfare

  – eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown

  SNAFU: Black Ops

  – eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown

  Coming Soon

  SNAFU: Resurrection

  – eds Amanda J Spedding & Geoff Brown

  HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

  Dave Beynon

  “Are you done yet?”

  Falstaff wore his usual roll-eyed expression of impatience. He tapped his foot, checked his watch and looked theatrically at the column of soldiers moving out.

  “Almost,” I said, scribbling co-ordinates and notations in my notebook. “If the army allowed me a crew, this would all be going so much faster, Sergeant.”

  “No crew. Just lucky old me, but you know the drill: we move in, we secure, you map – quickly – then we move out. That’s the way it is.”

  I muttered under my breath.

  “Did you just say ‘Invasion on a budget’ again?”

  I nodded. I was indeed a broken record when it came to my need for a crew. Sgt Falstaff was as fine a person as you would meet in the soldiering profession but he lacked the temperament for surveying and mapmaking. You’d think a soldier would be good at standing still and holding a rangefinder or an elevation target but sadly, no. I’d had soldiers assisting me for the last twenty years and there wasn’t a one of them who didn’t sway.

  “You know, in the old days…”

  “Yes, I do know. In the old days, there would be a corps of engineers dispatched with each unit blah, blah, blah. I know. I almost sympathize. I really do. We soldiers, however, have a job to do. Do you think these indigenous people are going to quell themselves?”

  I glanced back along the narrow roadway I was mapping toward the village. The old man who spoke for the village had told Murray, our IPLO – Indigenous Persons Liaison Officer – that the name of the place was Ithalaco. That was Murray’s best guess at how it was phonetically spelled, given the dialect was hard for a human tongue to negotiate. Murray did her best, but even a linguist of her skill had difficulty reproducing the sounds the locals’ beaks created. Well, Ithalaco was what was on the map now.

  At the edge of the village, I’d placed a pair of markers. A traditional iron surveyor’s spike was hammered deep into the ground. The other marker was an elevated solar-powered beacon. I’d set it in the hope that one day there’d be a GPS satellite placed in orbit around this godforsaken world. A half-dozen local children moved cautiously around the two metre tall post, daring each other to touch it.

  “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of quelling needed. They seem a pretty cowed population. Maybe just this once I could have enough time to double-check my measurements before we move on?”

  “We don’t camp in the villages. The captain wants us five klicks into the jungle before we camp for the night. Can we go?”

  “Fine,” I said, not yet packing up my transit, the main measuring device I use for calculating distance, elevation and location. “First I need you to take your marker and stand over by that tree. And try to hold it steady for once. God, what I wouldn’t give for just one set of measurements that made sense at the end of the day.”

  I made the last of my notes then wrapped the notebook in good old fashioned oilskin. In the humidity of the jungle – any world’s jungle – portable computers were notoriously unreliable. Almost all of my equipment, from my optical sextant and transit right down to my pens, pencils and paper, was analog. My camera was digital, a bulky thing of neoprene, glass and plastic that seldom came out of its waterproof carrying case. It was so bulky I made sure Sgt Falstaff always ended up with it in his pack along with stakes, beacons, tapes and markers. I might not get a crew, but I was determined to make the good sergeant my own personal packhorse.

  I gave the village one last glance as I collapsed my tripod. The village elder who had spoken with Murray came to the edge of the village and chased away the children. He looked at me, raised his two left hands and pointed toward the jungle the troop was entering. With an oddly human gesture, he shook his head and then dropped his gaze to the ground. I would have asked him what he was trying to tell me but I’d only picked up a handful of words and most of those had to do with food. Murray had moved on at the head of the march. I smiled, careful not to show teeth, and waved to the old man. He shook his head in response and returned to the village.

  “While we’re young, Wilson,” said Falstaff. “You know how you want time to double-check your measurements? Jus
t once, I don’t want to be bringing up the rear.”

  I packed away the transit and secured my tripod to my pack. “What are you complaining about? In twenty years of following the army around making maps, I’ve never once had to set up a tent or prepare the evening meal.” I shouldered my pack and nodded toward the swath our trailblazers’ machetes had cut into the jungle. “And neither has my sergeant.”

  Falstaff smiled at that. “You might just have a point, Engineer Wilson.”

  * * *

  True to form, five kilometres from the village, measured by my boot-mounted pedometer, Falstaff and I found the camp. Dinner was well underway. A rehydrated salad and a soybean brick augmented with vitamins and minerals made for a nutritionally-balanced meal. How could it be that humanity managed to master faster-than-light travel but was hopelessly stymied when it came to infusing anything approaching flavor into a soybean brick?

  I took my foil plate and sat next to Murray.

  “Ted,” she said. “Nice to see you found us.”

  “Always nice to see you, too, Lisa. It doesn’t take a mapmaker to follow the trail this bunch leaves. Chicken tonight?”

  Murray lifted the edge of her nutrition block and shrugged. “I’ve no idea what kind of meat they tried to simulate with this one. They failed. Again.”

  “I’ve been eating this stuff for twenty years. A few years back there were a half dozen bricks that tasted just like smoked salmon. I think they were labelled as chicken. Never tasted anything so good before or since out of a ration pack.” I swallowed a chalky mouthful. “So, has the captain figured where we’re going tomorrow?”

  “I think we are exploring from here on. The village elder told me his village stood on the frontier. No other people heading… which way are we heading anyway?”

  I didn’t need to check my compass. “West. Well, west-ish. The magnetic north on this world is offset from the rotational axis by twenty-six degrees so your angle of—“I stopped myself. I’d long ago discovered the details of my profession made for snooze-worthy dinner conversation. “We’re kind of heading west.”

  “Chokohn – that’s the elder’s name – he told me there’s a string of villages that run the equivalent of north and south in a straight line along the edge of this denser jungle. He said they never come in here.”

  “Never? I know this jungle’s dense but Falstaff and I passed a ton of what looks like edible fruit on our way here.”

  She shrugged. “He said ‘never’.”

  “Maybe that explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  I described the elder’s actions and gestures as I was packing up to leave.

  “You’ve always got to be careful, Ted. You can’t assign human meaning to alien gestures. Jesus, there’s not universal consistency across human cultures, let alone alien ones.”

  “Well, it sure looked like he was trying to tell me not to come out here.”

  Murray shrugged. “They’re a primitive culture. Limited agriculture. Just starting to smelt metals. Maybe jungle represents the unknown and they’re naturally afraid of it.”

  “I guess. But for a fledgling culture, this jungle also represents new resources, right? Hey, that’s why we’re out here. But the old man said they don’t come out here at all? Not even to hunt? Not even those kids I saw poking around my beacon?”

  Murray shook her head. “This whole area is taboo. Because it’s taboo, there’s naturally superstition surrounding it.”

  “Boogeymen?”

  She laughed. I always liked it when I was able to coax a laugh from Murray.

  “Pretty much. But his word, if I’m right, translates to ‘The Others’.”

  “How ominous. Wait a minute. I thought that’s what the indigenous people called us.”

  “That’s what I thought they were calling us. They call us Jahahlla.” The word ended in a delightful trill that brought out Murray’s laugh lines. “I thought that meant ‘others’ until today. The elder explained the difference. I now know it means ‘visitors’ or ‘travellers’.”

  “So how do you say ‘others’?”

  There was nothing at all delightful about the guttural clack that came out of Murray’s mouth.

  “Oh… that doesn’t sound very friendly, does it?”

  “No. Chokohn told me we shouldn’t come out here. I explained to him as best I could that we’re mapping the area so that when more visitors arrive they’ll know where everything is. He told me we didn’t want to know what was in the jungle. He said we could just end our map at the edge of his village and go back the way we came.”

  “I wish. I can’t believe I’m about to say this but I could really go for the relative luxury of a spaceship right about now. We’ve been here for over a month now. This traipsing through the wilderness following soldiers is a young person’s game.”

  “You whine and complain but you love it. Besides, on a civilized world there’s no need for mapmakers.”

  “Or linguists. Not on the civilized ones.”

  “Too true,” she said. “It’s weird. Usually the locals are only too ready to have us push on.”

  “Not this time?”

  “No. Chokohn invited us to stay, rather than have us press on into the jungle. He said they’d hold a feast for us, if only we promised to go back the way we came.”

  “They really don’t want us out here, do they? Do you think they’re really concerned with us running into these Others you mentioned?”

  Murray picked at the last of her lettuce but made no motion to move that sad leaf to her mouth. “We hear things like this on other worlds. You know that. Oh, don’t go out there. Bad things are out there.” She inclined her head toward where the captain sat, eating and talking with her officers. “More often than not the locals are simply trying to keep our soldiers from finding some place of religious or cultural significance. Or from uncovering some nearby resources – resources they’d like to keep for themselves.”

  “You can hardly blame them. After all, it is their planet.”

  Murray placed her hand on my arm. “What a naïve notion, Cartographer First Class Wilson.” Her tone was good-natured, but there was a bitter undercurrent I wasn’t sure she’d intended to share. She lowered her voice a shade. “It’s their world until we find something useful. Then it becomes annexed. For their own protection, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “We’re all just one big happy galactic family.”

  Sgt Falstaff approached with his tray, eying his food brick dubiously.

  “Chicken?” he asked as he took a seat.

  “Chickenish,” said Murray. “So, what is the captain saying about tomorrow’s adventure. We’ll continue to the west?”

  “That’s her plan,” said Falstaff. “We’ll break camp at dawn then press on until we find a big enough gap in the tree canopy to launch a drone to scout ahead. We’ll reassess the situation then.”

  As it turned out, we never had a chance to launch that drone and only some of us ever got the chance to reassess the situation.

  * * *

  I’ve marched on more than three dozen worlds, through terrain far more varied than anything found in earth’s solar system. Each ecosystem brings its own challenges, and the only thing worse to march through than jungle is swamp. After hacking our way for three hours without a break, the jungle abruptly opened into a vast misty wetland shrouded with a fetid layer of yellowish fog.

  “Private Ho, let’s have an atmospheric test before we press on,” the captain called out from the front of the line. I heard one of the soldiers moving through the ranks, though I couldn’t see her. I was reaching for the respirator in the pouch on my hip when the captain called the all clear. “No toxins.”

  Those were the last words spoken before everything went to hell.

  The fog drifted to the edge of the jungle, enveloping us and reducing our visibility. Falstaff stood two metres away. I could barely see him. From the wetlands, I heard what sounded like a bre
aking wave accompanied by a locust swarm’s worth of fluttering.

  Two quick shots were fired from the front of the line, followed by a wet slap and a loud crack. A rapid burst of gunfire, a scream and then the sound of branches snapping as something flew through the jungle to my left, landing with a meaty thump. As part of the Cartography Corp, I carry no weapon, yet I found myself instinctively reaching for one at my hip. Falstaff, long a soldier before he became my assistant, reached for a weapon he did not have. He unclasped the marker staff, brandishing it like a spear.

  I raised my hand and was about to speak when something leathery, grey and moist reached out of the fog and dragged Falstaff away. The marker staff fell to the ground. As I reached for his foot, a length of ropy, slime-coated tentacle slapped against my cheek. The tentacle’s tip was just below my eye. It terminated in a glistening thorny claw that dripped a pus-like yellow venom.

  A quick jab just below my left eye, then oblivion.

  * * *

  An alien insect crawling across my eyelid startled me awake. My mouth seemed full of ash. As I opened my eyes, I realized the left one was swollen shut, save for a crusty sliver. When I tried to lift a hand to determine the extent of the swelling I realized I’d been bound.

  I was naked. Sitting. My outstretched legs were tightly secured with braided jungle vines lined with tiny nettles that irritated my skin. Behind me, my hands were tied with the same type of vine. Like guy-wires securing an upright post, three lengths of vine kept me from slumping onto my side. Whatever had taken us had dragged us to a boggy clearing. On the ground before me, my clothing and gear was laid out, neat and orderly. Everything had been examined and lined up. My notebooks lay open and my hand-drawn maps were unfurled next to their waterproof cylinders.