The Expert System's Champion (Expert System #2) - Adrian Tchaikovsky Page 0,1

could work with, all the right elements. Oxygen, carbon, plenty of water. Life, recognisably the building blocks of life. It was supposed to be paradise, ripe for colonising. Except apparently you could have every familiar Earth element and put them together in a way utterly inimical to anything from Earth. The world rejected them from their arrival, and continued to do so, moment by moment. They couldn’t eat it without being poisoned. They couldn’t touch it without potentially fatal allergic reactions to everything. And they were here, now. It wasn’t a return trip. Hundreds of would-be colonists, come light years from home, just to plant a flag in a planet that murdered them by its very nature.

“Fine,” he spat out, because right then agreeing was less effort. “Guns. Print out guns, ammunition. Something heavy enough to get through those shells.” They were the size of a two-person transport, those not-molluscs. Small-arms fire or light energy weapons wouldn’t stand a chance. “Or a hammer, if you really want.” And what can they do, poor dumb beasts that they are? They were the Galapagos tortoises of an alien world, and they wouldn’t even have the wit to rue the day they met humanity.

Only after she’d gone, after he was back in his pod with strict instructions to shoot him full of downers and let him sleep for a week, did he realise he never asked her what they did with the sampler drones. What they did, instead of eating, that so discomfited her. But it was too late then, and by the time they woke him, it was a moot point.

* * *

They were an unlovely thing, Lena Dal thought. But if they’d stuck to simply crawling about in the mud like the snails they resembled, she would have been content to share a world with them. At least until a solution was found to long-term human habitation here. If that solution involved snail genocide she wouldn’t weep. She might be a bioengineer but that didn’t mean she was soft on every creature in the cosmos.

She’d come out with Shay Park and Orindo Snapper, geologist and technician respectively. They’d used too many expedition resources fabricating large-bore percussion weapons and now they were escorting a sampler drone out along the beach. They’d already seen a dozen of the monstrous mollusc-alikes, even on the short walk from the dome complex to the sea. The sister colony expedition had set up in the wind-shadow of a great rise, a slanted boulder, fifteen metres high, that had been rolled up to the high-water mark by some ancient storm. Or perhaps left by retreating glaciation, though they’d seen little other sign of that. It remained the landscape’s lone muck-and-vegetation-encrusted shelter. A bastion against the fierce winds that came off the great greenish expanse of the sea, the water murky as a weed-choked pond with a scum of plankton. Filthy. She wouldn’t want to put a foot in it. Yet this ecosystem was the most amenable to conversion for human uses. Coming about the boulder-hill’s broad, rounded base, she felt her heart sink at the sight. The beach was utterly desolate, windswept, with a strand line of decaying purple detritus speckled with the odd corpse of some oceanic denizen. Not fish. Not even not-fish as the snails were not-snails. Macrofauna on this world had a kind of a skeleton but no spine. The hydrodynamic shape that evolved over and over on Earth never found a foothold here. Everything that swam was all webbed legs, like spider-crabs crossed with bats. And dead, if it had washed up here. If she weren’t suited up, she’d have a noseful of alien decay, a weirdly floral, cloying scent, but a stink, nonetheless. She reckoned they’d stink alive, too. She hated them, but not as much as the snails.

They dominated the beach. She could see thirty of them, the smallest as large as she was, the largest four times that. They made their desultory way along the strand, picking over the detritus. Too big, too slow, too wrong. And they didn’t care about her. She meant nothing to their creeping existence. Except they didn’t even slide about like real snails. Beneath that crumpled, swept-back cone of a shell there were greyish legs, like fingers. As though the snail was a hand nestled into that great stony shell like an obscene hermit crab. Mostly they stayed low, and only the stumps of their fingertips were visible, broad about as Lena’s thigh. But she’d seen