2951-08-30 – Tales from the Service: The Battle on Knife’s Edge


Lukas Kaufmann waved his arc rifle’s scope back and forth over the door at the base of the airfield’s control tower, trying to think of what could be done. In reality, ideas were Lieutenant Jansour’s department; nobody expected a marksman corporal to come up with a tactic that would save a two-company raid, but Lukas couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole operation rested on his shoulders. In a little while, perhaps any moment, that door would open, and the two Incarnation air-crew who’d rushed in would come back out to re-board their aircraft. If it took off again, it might spell disaster.

“If only we had some cover on the approach.” Sergeant Calvo grumbled. “Pray for a rain squall, boys and girls.”

“Shame they’ll know we’re here if we use smoke.” Valero, the company’s other marksman, used his laser designator to mark a point near the tower. “A smoke rocket right here would blind that Sirocco until Calvo was right on top of them.”

Lukas sighed in silent sympathy with Valero’s frustration. The whole attack relied on surprise; if they started throwing around smoke rockets, the Nate defense program would put everyone on high alert in less than a second. Calvo’s idea, if assisted by a little divine intervention, was less likely to end in disaster. If only there was a way to generate smoke or mist that was not obviously the result of enemy action…

Lukas’s riflescope wandered up from the tower toward the marked point, backtracking along the line of the stiff breeze that cut shimmering rivers through the low, heather-like growth that covered the airfield. Then he kept scanning along that line, until a Sirocco’s blocky landing skid filled his view. He zoomed out until he could see the whole aircraft, and the maintenance personnel already swarming over its one badly damaged engine. As he looked on, two Incarnation techs pried the armored engine cowling loose and swung it aside.

“Lieutenant, I have an idea.” Lukas used his laser designator to mark a point on the aircraft’s fuselage away from the technicians. “But I need your gun up here as soon as possible.”

There was brief silence on the channel as Jansour puzzled out what Lukas was thinking and why his HKR P82 phasebeam carbine, a weapon not normally used in the marksman role, was necessary to putting it into action. “Be there in twenty seconds, Kaufmann.”

Lukas had only counted to seventeen when he heard the underbrush behind him rustle. He rolled over, hand going to his side-arm, but sat up and saluted the moment he saw Lieutenant Jansour’s brown oval face and the gold braid on his uniform shoulders.

Jansour waved the salute away and tossed Lukas his carbine. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Take my rifle.” Lukas shifted away from the arc rifle, which rested in place on its bipod, and lay down where he could place the carbine’s stubby barrel on a protruding root. Jansour was a good shot at normal battle range, but there was no time to instruct him on the finer points of arc-rifle gunnery. “Watch the door.”

As the lieutenant lay down and shouldered the heavy weapon, Lukas reached into his hip pocket for a meta-lens magnifier, and clipped it onto the low-magnification scope built into Jansour’s carbine. A laser was a very accurate weapon which needed very little range calibration, but its beam tended to scatter a bit at long range; the FVDA generally discouraged their use on targets beyond five hundred meters. This time, Lukas needed it to maintain its punch at three times that distance.

Swinging the carbine’s scope onto the damaged Sirocco, Lukas sighted in on a vulnerable-looking part of the now exposed inner workings of the damaged engine. For this to work, he needed to wait for just the right moment – and he needed not to hit any of the techs swarming around the aircraft.

“Going to try to make smoke by other means, Mr. Calvo.” Jansour reached over and patted Lukas on the shoulder. “Go the moment you have your cover.”

Lukas saw a technician pull a component from deep within the engine, look it over, then grab a replacement from his bag. He aimed at the center of the engine and watched the technician lean in to plug in the new module. He had to make the timing so exact that any onlooker would think the resulting flash was a result of that technician’s work.

The man’s shoulder jerked as the component settled into place, and Lukas pulled the trigger with one fluid motion. The phasebeam’s capacitors shrieked their usual tone, and several megawatts of energy in the form of high energy photons sped across the intervening space and impacted the engine.

Most of the technicians leapt back from the resulting flash and shower of sparks. The man whose work Lukas had timed his shot with jerked back, but came up short with his hand stuck within the engine. A moment later, flames erupted from several points as the superheated metal ignited lubricant, electrical insulation, and other flammable materials. The stuck technician and several others vanished behind a snarl of flickering flames and oily black smoke.

“Your smoke screen, Sergeant Calvo.” Lukas set the carbine down and gently nudged Lieutenant Jansour away from the arc rifle. Already, the smoke was beginning to waft away from the engine fire across the field toward the intact Sirocco. In only ten seconds, the aircraft near the tower was all but invisible within the dark pall.

“Squad, advance.” Calvo’s grim voice bore a hint of relief. “Hunt, Pelts, board the Sirroco. The rest of you, with me.”

“Supporting squads, make ready.” Jansour picked up his carbine, checked it, then scrambled to his feet and began working his way down the ridge.

When Calvo’s squad had almost reached the tower and aircraft, Lukas saw movement. The control tower door opened, and a trio of Incarnation personnel hurried out at a pace that suggested concern, but not alarm. They still did not know what was happening, but if they spotted Calvo’s men, they would.

Lukas sighted in on the middle figure of the trio, flicked off the arc rifle’s safety, and squeezed the trigger. A tinny buzz proceeded a strong recoil and a sharp crack like lightning. The scope briefly went black to protect Lukas’s eye from the light thrown up by the lightning-like discharge. The figure under the reticle burst into flame and collapsed. The two on either side of him went rigid and fell to the ground, their limbs flailing as their implants, scrambled by the electromagnetic discharge, fired random impulses into their nervous systems.

Calvo’s men reached the trio an instant later. As soon as Hunt and Pelts had gotten aboard the Sirocco, the sergeant finished off the three dying men with his side-arm, then led his troops toward the still-open tower door.

“Air threat neutralized. All squads, advance.” Jansour’s voice bore a hint of triumph.

Lukas turned his rifle toward the technicians servicing the third Sirocco, hoping to interrupt them from making it airworthy once more. Instead, he found them all shouldering their weapons and taking cover.

From somewhere down the ridge, Valero’s arc rifle cracked and spat a bolt of energy down into the mass of defenders. Lukas, still waiting for his own capacitors to recharge, scanned for likely targets. Though there would now be a sharp firefight, the outcome did not seem in doubt. The airfield, and at least one intact Sirocco, were as good as taken.


The FVDA, as its name implies, was initially formed as a garrison and defense force, and all reports suggest that it is rather late in developing offensive tactics to suit its personnel and equipment. Morioncruz, though it is a joint deployment with strong Marine support, has been something of a testbed for FVDA offensive doctrine.

Because of its lightweight standard equipment and frontier-raised troops, the FVDA seems to be focusing on small unit, rugged-terrain offensive operations, especially flanking and infiltration maneuvers through difficult terrain which Incarnation troops seem ill suited to defend. Such terrain has been common on most of the contested worlds along the Coreward Frontier, and perhaps counter-attacks of this nature on Margaux might have changed the result there.

[N.T.B. – Most likely, these small unit offensives have been with hand-picked veteran units. I doubt most FVDA outfits are capable of these tactics. Still, reports from Morioncruz suggest that the liberation of that world is imminent; the FVDA must be doing something right, even if it is just tying up enemy troops to keep them out of the way of the main Marine-led offensive drive.]

2951-08-30 – Tales from the Service: The Encirclement on Morioncruz

Though there has not been much datacast media activity regarding the place, Fifth Fleet has announced that an attempt to liberate the minor colony of Morioncruz is ongoing. Apparently the force sent to this world is considerable, mainly consisting of fast cruiser forces and some of the fastest troop transports available.

The battle line of Fifth Fleet is, it seems, not present; it remains at Maribel, ready to pounce on Håkøya should the enemy respond to the battle at Morioncruz in force. Admiral Venturi apparently does not fear that Maribel is in significant danger of the same sort of attack, but using only the fastest forces available is probably also a hedge against this eventuality.

We have gotten a few accounts, some extremely brief, from the mainly FVDA force deployed to Morioncruz. The battle on the ground has been difficult, but not, apparently, very bloody, at least not so far; the Incarnation troops there are reported to be numerous and well supplied but not well dug in, suggesting the world has been a sort of barracks depot for troops that were preparing for offensive action. This account, which will take at least two weeks to bring to this feed, is of a minor action at the fringes of the main battle area, one of probably dozens of such attacks and counter-attacks of similar scale.


Lukas Kaufmann placed his scope’s triangular reticle over the narrow doorway in the side of the landing field control tower half a kilometer away, then sent a double click on the squad comms channel to indicate that he was in position, ready to cover the advance of his compatriots. If any Incarnation personnel came out of that structure, they’d be walking into a blast of electrified plasma courtesy of his arc rifle.

A moment later, an answering chirp on the same channel announced that the advance was starting. Somewhere ahead of Lukas, down near the bottom of the ridge on which he lay, a dozen FVDA soldiers would be clambering through the underbrush at the edge of the cleared landing field to begin creeping toward the tower, its associated sensor station, and a nearby maintenance hangar.

“Be advised, Orbital reports we’ve got inbound enemy air.” Lieutenant Jansour’s thick Memoire de Paix accent filtered into Lukas’s ear through his comms earpiece. “Probably Siroccos coming back from the main event. Stay under cover until they’re on the ground.”

“How long do we have, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Calvo, leading the group tasked with taking the tower, sounded like he was whispering into his comms pickup. Though there probably was no chance of him being overheard from more than a hundred meters away, Lukas didn’t blame the sergeant for being cautions anyway; Incarnation sensor equipment was notoriously good.

“Ten minutes or less, Mr. Calvo. Abort your approach.”

“Acknowledged. Staying low.” Calvo didn’t sound happy about that, and Lukas didn’t blame his compatriot. If the Siroccos spotted any of the attackers on their landing approaches, they could sweep the area with their strafing lasers, putting a stop to the attack long enough for reinforcements to be pulled off the main battle line to thwart this behind-the-lines expedition.

Lukas, knowing that he was no longer required to cover the tower door, swept his scope across the field toward the maintenance hangar. He was just in time to see its main doors creeping open to permit a cavalcade of tracked and wheeled vehicles to spill out onto the apron, each filled with Nate technicians and their equipment. If Calvo had tried to go ahead with his attack, he and his men would have run right into this group and been outnumbered; even technicians, this close to the front line, would keep their laser rifles close at hand.

“Movement by the hangar.” Lukas reported. “Multiple vehicles. Looks like the maintenance team.”

Lieutenant Jansour was quick to respond. “Hold fire, Mr. Kaufmann.”

Lukas winced; the lieutenant should know he didn’t need to be told. Firing on the maintenance vehicles now would ruin the surprise of the attack, and that was the whole point. If possible, the objective was to take as much of the base’s equipment and garrison intact; once the sensor station was disabled, a group of transports would fly in to haul it all away. Headquarters might even be able to find pilots for a few Siroccos, if those managed to make it into FVDA hands intact. Even if the garrison managed to destroy them, waiting until the aircraft were on the ground would all but ensure they were removed from the battle for good.

Lukas watched the maintenance team lining up their vehicles until the deep-throated rumble of incoming Siroccos began to echo off the hills on every side. The sound sent chills down his spine. He had been under Sirocco attack on Mereena, and again at Glen Moore, and this time, he was glad to be out of sight at the ridgeline, rather than down with the rest of the squad.

Swinging the arc rifle up and along the opposite ridge, Lukas scanned for the incoming aircraft. Three huge sweep-wing vehicles came into view before long, flying low against the hills in a line. A thin trail of gray smoke trailed behind the second of the three, and the third was flying slightly askew, likely as a result of superficial damage to one of its wings.

Valero, positioned several hundred meters down the ridge with a better shot toward the hangar, beat Lukas to reporting their arrival. “Siroccos in sight.” Valero’s drawling Frontier twang carried a note of dry humor. “Two of ‘em are damaged. Looks like they’ve been having a bad day out there.”

Lukas hoped that was true. The fate of Morioncruz had still been very much in doubt when their group had set off on its long trek around to attack the enemy rear, and they had heard very little from Orbital about the progress of the greater battle. Though the world was hardly among the Frontier’s most populous or prominent planets, it would do everyone good to take one back from Nate for a change. If the hated Siroccos couldn’t sweep the battlefield without being shot half to pieces, things were not going the way Nate wanted.

“Make sure your men are out of sight, Sergeant Calvo.” Jansour’s warning was probably once again not necessary, but like Lukas himself, Calvo had the good sense to keep quiet. Jansour was nervous; they all were.

The first of the aircraft, the undamaged one, made a low pass over the landing field while the one trailing smoke slowed and deployed its landing skids. The huge aircraft came to a shuddering halt just in front of the maintenance men, some of whom were already swarming forward toward it before it even touched down. A moment later, the other damaged Sirocco came down near the first, resting at a weird angle on a half-deployed landing skid below the damaged wing. It, too, was soon the object of the technicians’ attention.

The final aircraft, as if suspicious that its enemies lay in wait not far away, circled the field twice more before bringing itself in for a far more graceful landing close to the tower. As soon as it was down, its belly hatch disgorged a pair of men who dashed into the control tower.

“The last one’s keeping his damned engines warm.” Calvo grumbled. “If we go now, he’s going to be airborne before we get twenty meters.”

Lukas scanned the Sirocco with his rifle scope. Like most Incarnation vehicles, there were no clear viewpanels on its body; the crew could see out only with the aid of the cameras studding its fuselage and wings. A hit on most of the aircraft would leave only superficial damage. He had a decent angle on the port-side engine air intake, but there was no telling what a shot with an arc rifle would do there. It might do nothing, or it might blow up the engine, and that close to the tower, an explosion might wreck most of what they hoped to capture.

“If we wait for those two to get back, he’ll be airborne anyway, Sergeant.” Lukas gritted his teeth. They hadn’t brought much in terms of heavy weaponry, certainly nothing that could take down an airborne Sirocco before it cut them to pieces. The crew of that aircraft could easily foil the whole raid, if they reacted fast enough.

 

2951-08-16 – Tales from the Inbox: The Cover Crop


Evgeny sat with his back to the reassuring bulk of a proper Reach-manufactured tilling machine and called up the farmstead’s network on his wristcuff to check what was still functional. The debris had stopped falling, but he could still hear occasional fizzling and sparking sounds from somewhere in the chaos that had been his experimental plot, along with wet squelching sounds and viscous dripping.

To his dismay, Evgeny saw that four of the six Incarnation crop-tender machines he’d acquired at great expense were not even responding on the network. The status readouts for the other two were a cascade of orange and red indicators, along with a fast-flowing stream of binary data that appeared on the display only as a block of wavy static. Though the makers of the machines spoke a variant of Anglo-Terran, he could make nothing of the labels associated with these readouts.

Muttering a resigned curse, Evgeny looked up from his wrist, only to have his attention transfixed by the beams of light filtering into the shed from dozens of jagged holes, some of them big enough to put his fist through.

The blast had riddled his little pre-fab cabin, too, but Evgeny decided he would prefer to be sitting inside and drinking coffee while he considered his situation. After peering at the smashed plant-beds one more time, he clambered to his feet and, giving the pulped plants a wide berth, picked his way back to where he’d started his eventful morning.

Though his comms belt-pack was buzzing insistently, Evgeny collected a cup of coffee from the thankfully-undamaged food-fab unit, then brought it back out onto the balcony to look down at the center of the blast from a new angle. There was nothing left of the cabbage-like growths that had exploded. Only the stubby base of their tender machine remained, its internals dangling out of the shattered stump. Only a few centimeters of vine remained above the soil, and each severed end leaked greenish-yellow goo. The other plants had been variously mangled, diced, or pulped, and nothing looked salvageable.

After a few sips of coffee, he still didn’t see any bright spots on his outlook, except for the daylight shining through the shed opposite. He had not told anyone about where he was going or what he would be doing there, and the plot of land was kept well away from prying eyes. The food-fab still worked, but with the cabin perforated, all it would take was one good rain squall to short everything out. The tracked ground-crawler he’d hauled everything out on was parked far enough away that it was probably undamaged, but he’d never be able to haul everything back. Pieces of the Nate machines were probably scattered hundreds of yards into the trees. Eventually, someone would find one and the trail would lead right back to him. The authorities would have way too many questions, and he wasn’t interested in answering any of them, ever.

The comms unit was still buzzing as Evgeny tossed his freshly empty mug into the oozing vegetable ruin and started for the crawler. If he recalled correctly, there was a kilo or two of mining explosive in there which had been part of a previous cover story suggesting he was rambling about in the woods prospecting for minerals. The less he left of the site, the better.

Once he had found the explosives, Evgeny paused to check the comms board on the crawler, which told him he’d missed dozens of messages and comms channel requests, all from the same source, an anonymized numeric identifier. He ignored them; in his line of work, anyone who wanted to be anonymous and couldn’t be bothered to at least steal a respectable datasphere identity wasn’t worth dealing with.

He’d set explosives around the shed and the remains of the garden plots when a single-seat lighter zipped overhead at high speed, then banked into a high turn and began to circle back. Wincing, Evgeny tossed the rest of the explosives under the cabin and stood to wave at the aircraft as it passed overhead a second time, giving it the universal double-thumbs-up that indicated that he was all right. Hopefully, that would dissuade the pilot from landing.

The lighter was, however, not dissuaded. It circled to bleed velocity and altitude, and would soon be landing. Evgeny wondered how he’d explain the mess, or the obviously foreign machinery littered about as he picked his way over toward the only obvious landing site to meet it.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to explain. The pilot hopped out the moment the little aircraft came to a stop. Her reddish skin and mane of pearly white hair told Evgeny who it was; after all, there were only two or three Atro’me on the whole planet, and only one of them had any interest in his affairs.

“Constable Neeson!” Evgeny waved with enthusiasm he didn’t feel. “What brings you out to my holdings?”

Neeson folded her arms over her chest. As one of the minority of Atro’me who had elected to have her body and face modified to better match those of a human, she was not unattractive, if one could get over the fact that she wasn’t human, but those yellow eyes always made his blood run cold. “Care to tell me what insanity you’re up to this time, Evgeny?”

Evgeny shrugged. “Agriculture project.” He followed Neeson’s gaze behind himself to the shredded shed. “It’s, ah. Not going very well. Can I help you?”

“There’s been an explosion.” Neeson frown ed. “I suspect you might know something about it.”

Evgeny once again glanced behind himself. “It was, ah, a fertilizer accident?”

The constable stared at Evgeny blankly for several seconds. “Do take this seriously. Two people are dead.”

Evgeny held up a hand. “We are not talking about the same explosion, are we?”

Neeson frowned, then shrugged. “You thought I was coming about the mess over there? Bah. Blow up your own land all you like, as long as it’s all the way out here, and as long as you tell me what you know about bay Seven White.”

Evgeny froze. Bay Seven White was the spaceport berth where he’d met the smugglers who’d gotten him his cache of Incarnation agricultural equipment, the place he’d taken charge of those precious crates of now-destroyed machinery. That had been many weeks ago, but still, it couldn’t be a coincidence. “Something exploded at the spaceport in bay Seven White? Let me guess, the Ursula DeKalb was berthed there.”

Neeson nodded slowly. “So you do know something. I know you met that ship the last time it was in port. Do they work for you?”

“Oh, no. Not most of the time. Not right now anyway.” Evgeny winced. “Look, it’s, a complicated business relationship, you know how it is.”

“What do they deal in that might explode?” Neeson pointed one crimson finger at Evgeny. “I’ll forget to report that you bought some of whatever it is if you help me get to the bottom of this.”

Evgeny brightened. Immunity from being looked into wouldn’t last long, but it would last long enough for him to cover most of his tracks. “Oh, that would be just fine, Constable.” He beckoned toward the farm plot. “Right this way, and I’ll show you what’s left of what I bought from them.”


I am not sure if I buy Evgeny’s story about a convenient visit from a law enforcement professional looking into a blast at the spaceport. Sure, things explode at colonial spaceports from time to time, but the timing here is too convenient. I would suspect that our contributor here has compressed events into a shorter time-line as part of the track-covering he freely admits to.

Regardless, we should pay attention to the dangers of handling Incarnation equipment; many people seem to want to get their hands on “Nate” hardware but are not aware of the risks. If you want my advice, leave enemy materiel alone; the Confederated-make equivalent is in most cases just as good and much safer.

2951-08-16 – Tales from the Inbox: The Bitter Harvest

Though I cannot verify today’s account, its author claims that he (through channels unspecified) acquired a cache of agricultural tooling and a partial seed bank stolen the Incarnation held world of MacNeil’s End.

Probably intending to turn this enemy materiel into a grey-market exotic goods business, our source, who identifes himself only as Evgeny, seems to have expected to find various fast-growing foodstuffs adapted from Sagittarius species, ideal for keeping a large infantry force in supply. Evidence from ration packages collected on the battlefield seems to suggest that our enemy does indeed grow the food for its invasion forces relatively close to the front lines and process it only very little before packaging, so his expectation was only too reasonable.

What Evgeny found himself growing, however, was decidedly not food. His little plot of land (he fails to specify the world he introduced the crops to, but I suspect it was one of the low-population Farthing’s Chain planets nearest the Frontier) became host to a very interesting phenomenon.


Evgeny leaned on the porch-rail of his prefabbed cabin, chin resting on the tips of his fingers. Between him and the shed at the other end of the only clearing in his hundred-acre wooded holding, six fenced-in garden beds held six different varieties of crop. At the middle of each bed, a silvery machine configured to tend that particular crop stood, its various spray-nozzles and articulated arms recessed into its sides.

Evgeny didn’t know much about the machines, except that they had done most of the planting, tending, and weeding in their respective plots themselves; he’d fed each a little cylinder of seeds, and they had read the instructions printed into a hexagonal data-crystal at the end of the cylinder. After that, all he’d needed to do was keep the water tower full, refill fertilizer hoppers when the lights started blinking, and keep the generator behind the cabin humming.

The problem with running unfamiliar machinery and unfamiliar crops, of course, was that when something went wrong, he had no idea what would fix it. When he’d gone to bed the previous night, the experiment had seemed poised at the edge of total success – all six beds had produced healthy-looking plants, and all the plants had produced healthy-looking fruits, tubers, leafy greenery, or cabbage-like buds. According to the plant-tending machines, the growth cycle would be over some time before dawn, so Evgeny had retired, looking forward to a very interesting morning’s harvest.

Instead, the late morning light had revealed that the garden had been thrown into a very interesting, and very concerning, state of pure bedlam. Red lights flashed forlornly on all the machines, which had apparently given up their efforts to prune and tend the crops when their timers had expired. This expiry had coincided with a very strange phenomenon – the vine-like, yellow-fruit bearing plants in plot number two had grown explosively overnight, and now their fuzzy tendrils were encircling the tuberous stalks in plot number one and forming a rather daintily attractive net around several of the giant-cabbage-looking bulbs in plot number five. Three had only avoided invasion because the previously shiny, broad-leafed plant growing there now dripped an oily secretion which seemed to wither all other plant matter on contact. Four had withered almost to death, and the foliage in number six was taking on an unhealthy yellowish-gray color.

That he was dealing with genetically altered life-forms, Evgeny knew from the beginning; most crops grown anywhere in the Reach were gene-tweaked in some fashion. He had expected the tweaks to adapt the crops to a fast growth cycle, and that seemed accurate, but he had not expected an explosive and suicidal growth spurt in the final few hours, overnight.

He had already checked the composition of the last batch of fertilizer, some of which was still in the machine hoppers, and it was identical to what he’d been using all along. He’d also already checked the water lines and the machines from his control board; everything was green. The machines had hit the end of their cycle and transmitted success codes only six and a half hours before he woke to this disaster. In that time, everything had apparently gone wrong.

As Evgeny stared out at the plants and wondered whether anything could be salvaged, he noticed that the yellowish fruit on the sprawling vines in plot number two still looked plump and healthy. Between them and the intact looking cabbage-things in five, he thought maybe he could get two of the crops out of the beds and see what they were good for. He didn’t have the intended agricultural harvesting machinery, but he had a good pruning hook and a basket; manual labor would have to suffice.

Still wondering what he might have done wrong, Evgeny headed for the shed to get his tools. He’d bought a piece of land with almost the same rainfall, soil, and solar energy conditions as the place where the seeds had been stolen from. True, those conditions were on another planet, but at first that hadn’t seemed to be a problem. As far as the machines were concerned, everything was going well right up until the end; it was almost as if the crops had been offended at their master’s late-sleeping habits and destroyed themselves in a rage between dawn and his rising.

Evgeny didn’t realize how preoccupied he was with such thoughts until he tripped over one of the vines spanning the path from number two to number five and nearly fell headlong. Scowling, he extracted his foot from the tangle and finished the transit. With a closer look at the oil-sweating leaves in number three, he thought that this might be intended – perhaps the plant was not a nutrient green after all, but a source of edible oils that could be easily refined. That those oils wilted other plants, however, did not give him any inclination to test the theory himself – certainly not without extensive lab work.

As he reached the shed, Evgeny heard a strange sound behind him, a sort of tinny clicking, like electrical connections being made on a live circuit. Fearing that his generator might have developed problems, he turned to check it, only to stop in place, mystified by the spasmodic jerking of the vines which had grown across the path. A single twitching wave seemed to start way back at the tendrils invading plot number one, then to work its way up the thickening vines to the roots, and back down the vines once more to end at the increasingly vine-encased cabbage-growths in plot five.

Evgeny had encountered many species classified as flora which possessed some motive power, so movement itself was not terribly concerning. What was concerning was the metallic, sparky clicking that accompanied each wave’s origin at the tuberous plants in plot one. It almost seemed like the vine was being electrocuted by those specimens, but that didn’t make any sense, did it? He had heard of electricity being used by natural species, even on Earth, but why would anyone develop an electricity-generating crop?

He didn’t have much time to ponder this question before he noticed that the destinations of the twitching movement – the cabbage-like plants encircled by vine tendrils – were beginning to hum ominously, and the hum was growing louder with every wave of electrical twitching. Worse still, they seemed to be swelling, their bulbous interior beginning to bulge haphazardly through the outer leaves and the net of tendrils.

Evgeny watched the cabbage-things in blank-faced bemusement for fifteen long seconds as the hum grew again and again. When the inevitable thought finally slipped through, it was almost too late. He scrambled into the shed and dove behind a heavy ground-tilling machine just as the first of the cabbage-plants exploded – not the wet, fleshy explosion one would expect from a vegetable, but a bright flash and a hail of splinters more crystalline than woody.

Evgeny cowered there until the resulting chain reaction finally subsided, and carefully peered over the machine and across his thoroughly ruined garden. Only then did he begin to revise his assumption about the nature of the seeds he’d acquired.