Man in Amber

There was no point in tapping the acceleration stud again. I had the jitney maxed, or close to it, and speed was not what the designers had in mind. We were explorers, supposed to be calmly, casually examining the surroundings wherever we went. Not two guys rushing back to base from an accident.

I silently swore and cursed at everything. Damn the execs who wouldn’t give us the flyer for a trip this far out. Damn the mediocre precautions against known dangers. Damn this planet. Damn the distance. Damn, damn, damn.

I glanced again over at Roy, sitting impassively strapped in the other seat and watching the view ahead. He hates my constantly looking over at him, but I was scared and frustrated and angry, and I justified myself that I was just keeping an eye on his condition.

“I hope there’s no traffic cops around,” said Roy, his words coming out low, soft, and slow. “And I know you’re checking on me again, Peter. I’m okay — just focus on your driving. No use piling up this fancy buggy and spilling us both.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, and tried to force a joke. “The paperwork alone would be murder. Who wants to die twice?” The corner of Roy’s mouth edged up slightly.


We’d been working together for the company a few years when we got the assignment offer for Carter’s Planet. A routine assay to be made of the planet’s useful minerals and plant life, nothing unusual. Out about a year, three months on-planet, sign the releases, kiss the wife and kids goodbye, then come home to a fat paycheck and retire easy. Simple plan.

Two weeks before we came out of transition stasis, the advance team on the planet discovered the critters. More specifically, the critters discovered the team.

The planet already hosted a variety of flora and fauna, all of which seemed fairly bucolic, according to the reports. Interestingly, anything over about 55 kilos just sort of ambled around, ignoring the newcomers. Maybe one or two showed teeth, but then they’d get over what they were trying to express and slowly wander off. No human counterparts. Quiet little world.

One of the team, Simkins, had been outside, working a small research square of soil so they could see how Earth plants did in that environment. There was no concern about contaminating the planet — the soil was in containers, and the shields were still operating at the base, committed to the task of keeping CO2 low and our breathables comfortable. Nothing else was supposed to pass through.

We still aren’t sure how they got in, but we surmise Simkins had a tear in his encounter suit. As they say, that’s all it takes. Beatty, who was watching Simkins the entire time from inside the lab (standard precaution), said later that a dark translucent fog settled around Simkins for a minute, then dissipated. Simkins didn’t say anything, didn’t shout, just slumped to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

All hell broke loose in the lab, however. Everyone dived into their suits and readied the iso lab which, fortunately, had a door to the outside. Several went out to pick up Simkins who, to everyone’s surprise, got his feet under him as they stood him up, thanked everyone, and slowly made his way to the iso lab door. Under escort, of course.

The iso lab gear was good, as good as you can get set up on a remote planet, but it still took a week to find them in Simkins. They were miniscule — you needed magnification to see them well. They probably started as a few, but they reproduced quickly, and they were apparently organized. They had started at Simkins’ extremities and were working their way to his core, slowly, inexorably. And they were feeding, not on the meat, not on the blood components. They were consuming axons and dendrites, particularly along those nerves that twitched the muscles, the same pathways that Galvani’s electricity made the legs of dead frogs move. They were like gourmets at a fete, slowly gobbling up everything on the buffet. Simkins grew steadily more paralyzed, conscious the entire time, until they found the non-muscled inner organs and took a liking to the nerve cells there. The critters were chewing up all the energy, taking it for their own needs, and didn’t stop or leave until they were done — they were pretty dedicated to their grisly task. The swarm exited the host only after the host died from the massive organ failure. Apparently they lost interest in a food supply gone stale. Not unlike parasitic wasps, I was told.

They named the damned things for Simkins. Obscene way to be memorialized. “That which does kill us, makes us immortal.” Something like that. Simkins, himself, tried to make light of the situation and called them ZomBees. Stupid joke. The name stuck.

It also explained the behavior of the larger native animals beyond the shields, the ones that just wandered around seemingly aimlessly. Brain was firing, but the body was just carrying it around and not feeling much else. Run? No. Feel pain? Maybe. Feed? Oh, sure, why not? This looks okay. And, repeat, until your insides stopped getting instructions, the connections vacuumed away by the Bees, and you laid down and stopped living. Except it was different for us Earthers, as Simkins demonstrated. They liked us — we didn’t malinger so long.

So, yeah. Roy got Bee’d. I’d heard a soft hum as we worked opposite corners of a target spot, no more than a couple meters apart. I turned, saw the cloud around him, watched him drop and the cloud clear. Without thinking about much else, even my own safety, I scooped up Roy, carried him to the jitney, strapped him in and punched the controls to life, screaming to the base over the radio every ten minutes the entire way out of the zone.