Category: SF&F Book Reviews

There was a little additional discussion of the hunt but Bob’s prognosis on the end date seemed to have depressed his comrades and so they departed one at a time after a few minutes.  Dave headed home and reached his front door just as the dusk warning siren sounded.  He felt a little shudder of fear pass through his body at the sound.  Maybe tonight’s talk had depressed him more than he thought.  He opened the outer door and closed it behind him and then the scanner activated and after twenty seconds the inner door opened, he stepped inside, the inner door closed behind him and the safety bolts shot home with a loud and comforting bang.  And based on that sequence he knew that everyone was home for the night.  They were locked up tight and could live and sleep secure for the night.  Walking through the entry hall he reached the dining room where the cheerful yellow light revealed his younger brothers and sisters sitting around the table working on their school assignments.  They looked up as he entered but it was his father who smiled with a relieved expression that the last of the family was home, “Busy day Dave?”  He shook his head, “No Dad, I just spent some time with the boys to blow off some steam.  Nothing too busy,” he lied, not wishing to upset his family about the hive found so close by.  His father nodded his head and went back to working on some chore at his work station.  He walked through to the kitchen and found his mother cleaning up from dinner.  She smiled at him and handed him a warm plate of meat, mashed potatoes and some kind of vegetable hash of some sort.  He smiled at this mystery course but thanked her and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.  “Gina stopped by today and asked if you were going to the social this weekend,” she mentioned in what she hoped sounded like an off-hand way.

“Oh really.  And I suppose you told her I could” he shot back.  She looked offended and said, “I did nothing of the sort.  I told her I’d tell you to call her.  And you should.  She’s the nicest girl you’ve ever brought around here and she’s very pretty too and if you’re not careful someone else will speak up and win her away from you.  Girls like that don’t wait around forever you know.”  Dave laughed to hear her vehemence but he promised to call her that night.  Finishing his plate, which was quite good even to the unrecognizable goulash, he put his plate in the dishwasher and patted his mother’s shoulder and thanked her as he headed for the living room.  His father had migrated there too and was watching a video about a new surveillance system that incorporated lasers and advanced machine intelligence.  Seeing this brought back Dave’s gloom as he reflected on how life always came back to the hunt and the lock down.

His father must have sensed his black mood and turned off the video and said, “Sorry Dave I needed that video for a work meeting I have tomorrow.  I should have had it on the small screen where you couldn’t see it.”  Dave smiled halfheartedly and said, “Nah, it’s nothing Dad.  Just one of those days, you know?”  Then he said less cheerily, “We found a nest pretty close by today and I guess I let it get me down.  Then Mom starts telling me that I better scoop up Gina before she marries someone else.  It just feels like we’re living in a nightmare and I can’t see how it goes on.”  His father looked down and sighed then looked up, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.  When I was about your age, I met your mother and she wanted to get married right away but I couldn’t imagine bringing children into the world with danger and horror all around us.  Back then it was considerably worse than it is now.  We had lost two of my brothers to the beasts when I was a teenager.  They were older than I and had been part of the hunt.  A communication snafu had them unprotected practically on top of a hive in their sector.  I was devastated.  I couldn’t see the sense in living that way, always one mistake away from losing friends or family to these awful creatures.  I despaired.

But my father told me something that has stayed with me ever since.  He said, ‘Hal, remember that you come from the smartest, toughest animal to ever appear on this green Earth.  Your ancestors had to fight off saber-tooth tigers and cave bears with flint spear-heads and bone clubs.  And their only protection were caves and maybe a campfire.  But over the course of a million years, they killed off all those predators and made the Earth a garden.  And by God, you and your descendants are going to rid this Earth of these giant vermin, take my word for it.’  So, I thought about what he had said and I understood.  There is within us all of the cunning, courage and tenacity of our ape-men ancestors and we should look at this crisis as a challenge that we must accept and overcome.  We’re men and our enemy is just a stupid bug that needs exterminating.  It’s just a part of life.  A problem no different than cancer or earthquake.  Something we use our brains to figure out and eventually eradicate.  Just like the saber-tooth.”  His father looked off into the air for a second and then said, “You know your mother is right about Gina.  A girl that pretty is going to be snatched up pretty quickly if you don’t wake up.  Why don’t you give her a call.”  Then he walked away toward the kitchen.

Dave sat there for a few minutes thinking about everything his father had said.  Then he called up Gina and asked her out to the social.

Dave watched the flying drone’s video output on a twenty-four-inch screen that he perched on a shoulder height outcropping of rock in front of him.  It was flying at about three hundred feet of elevation over the landscape in front of him.  It was typical Northeastern US second growth forest; a mixture of conifers and deciduous trees breaking out into overgrown fields, swamps and rocky hills.  But in one of those fields, he could see the tell-tale earthen cone.  It was a hundred feet in diameter. Twenty feet high with a ten-foot round hole in the center.  And sure enough, there were five specimens of Camponotus vicinus gigas.  They ranged from nine to fifteen feet in length and were carrying the remains of some dairy cattle that they must have torn apart.  Sending the drone in for a closer look he saw that one of the ants was transporting what looked like human remains.

Dave geolocated the nest and then released two projectiles that plummeted from the drone directly into the entrance.  They were black and spherical, about six inches in diameter and they popped upon impact and released a cloud of red colored dust that thoroughly coated the entire entrance area.  Dave typed in a report on his actions and attached the geolocated video.  He also recommended that all human habitations within fifty miles be contacted and warned of the nest.  He specifically mentioned the dairy cattle and human predation.  Then he said a short prayer for the poor victim.

The rest of the day was uneventful.  The drone had covered the rest of the area in his portion of the grid and nothing else was found.  When the drone returned, he packed it up and waited for the transport to pick him up.  The transport landed in the clearing where he was set up.  Dave looked admiringly at the huge machine.  It was a two-hundred-foot square hovercraft with armor extending completely around a central deck.  There were guns located on all four sides and powered hoists on booms located in the center of the craft.  One of these booms was lowered toward his drone package and snagged it and hoisted it into the craft.  When it was clear Dave walked over to the closest door on the perimeter and waved his ID in front of the scanner and walked through the opening door.

Once inside he walked across the open deck to the control room and checked in with the supervisor.  The pilot was already starting the engines in order to head to home base.  The supervisor was already reading Dave’s report and said, “That hive is a disappointment.  We thought we cleared this whole sector three years ago.  Maybe the current virus isn’t 100% effective anymore.”  Dave nodded his head wearily, “Yeah, same old story.  Nothing works forever.  Eventually munitions and poison gas are what make the job thorough.  Anything less is just too dangerous.  We can’t have people getting torn to pieces by these monsters.  It’s not right.”

The supervisor gave him an angry look, “Look, we’re making progress.  The safe zone in this area of the grid used to be fifty miles square.  Now it’s five hundred.  We’re winning.  There are bound to be failures.  Stop getting so emotional.  Just do your job and be part of the solution.”  Dave grimaced but inside he knew the man was right.  Mankind had been dealing with the ants for over seventy years and for the last twenty years the tide had turned against the creatures.  Starting at the poles and working toward the equator the ants were being driven toward the tropics.  No one believed they could ever be extirpated from the amazon or equatorial Africa or Southern Asia but it was hoped that the temperate zones could be completely cleared and an effective barrier strategy established.

When Dave exited the transport in Fort Peterson in the White Mountains he headed for the local watering hole and joined up with his friends.  Half of them were miners in the local quarries and half were like him bug hunters for the government.  All being in the twenty- to thirty-year-old age group most of the talk was about where the best-looking women could be found.  But after they were finished lying about their weekends some of the miners were curious to know how the bug hunt was going.

The senior hunter at the table was Craig and at twenty-eight his vast knowledge of the project didn’t impress anyone too much but he attempted to give an authoritative lecture on the theory and practice of bug hunting, “What we’re seeing is a steady and comprehensive rolling back of the infested area throughout North America.  All of what was the Canadian territory except for British Columbia is already cleared.  In the former United States, New England, the Great Lakes region and the Mountain West is clear all the way to Eastern Washington and Oregon, down as far south as Colorado.  Projections indicate ten years will bring us down to the old Mexican border.”

Dave looked bleakly toward Craig and said, “We found a nest two hundred miles south of here that had just finished off the human and bovine residents of a dairy farm right before we got there.  I’m guessing ten years might be a little optimistic.  What have the university researchers published this year, Bob?”  Bob was a former academic who had joined the hunt after he lost his family to an infestation a few years earlier.  Biological modelling had been his field of research and he still had contacts within the bug modelling project.  The small bespectacled young man looked up at Dave and quietly began to talk, “Well Craig is right that we have turned a corner.  In the first twenty years of the war humanity lost essentially the entire human population of the tropical zone that was forty percent of the 2.69 billion people living, about a billion people.  We lost another billion people everywhere else.  After that we only lost another two hundred million over the course of fifty more years.  And this year was the first net population gain.

As far as the bugs.  Initially their population increase was asymptotic.  In the last twenty years it’s levelled off.  We don’t have any hard numbers but we have reduced their territory substantially in the last ten years.  The modelling I saw showed a hundred-year estimate to clear the temperate zones but that’s a low confidence study.  The problems with resistance to the viral agents we’ve been using makes it almost impossible to extrapolate the curves for anything more than a year with high confidence.”

Dave nodded his head, “That’s what I heard from someone in the headquarters this week.  Not particularly cheering.”