Subsequent unmanned probes showed no survivors of Colony 622 anywhere, and that the slime mold, beyond possessing enough intelligence to mount two separate coordinated attacks, was nearly impervious to traditional weaponry. Bullets, grenades and rockets affected only small portions while leaving other portions unharmed; flamethrowers fried up a top layer of slime mold, leaving layers underneath untouched; beam weaponry slashed through the mold but did minimal overall damage. Research on the fungicide the colonists had requested had begun but was halted when it was determined that the slime mold was present almost everywhere on the planet. The amount of effort to locate another inhabitable planet was deemed less expensive than eradicating the slime mold on a global scale.
Thomas' death was a reminder that not only don't we know what we're up against out here, sometimes we simply can't imagine what we're up against. Thomas made the mistake of assuming the enemy would be more like us than not. He was wrong. He died because of it.
Conquering the universe was beginning to get to me.
The unsettled feeling had begun at Gindal, where we ambushed Gindalian soldiers as they returned to their aeries, slashing their huge wings with beams and rockets that sent them tumbling and screeching down sheer two-thousand-meter cliff faces. It had really started to affect me above Udaspri, as we donned inertia-dampening power packs to provide better control as we leaped from rock fragment to rock fragment in Udaspri's rings, playing hide-and-seek with the spiderlike Vindi who had taken to hurling bits of the ring down to the planet below, plotting delicate decaying orbits that aimed the falling debris directly on top of the human colony of Halford. By the time we arrived at Cova Banda, I was ready to snap.
It might have been because of the Covandu themselves, who in many respects were clones of the human race itself: bipedal, mammalian, extraordinarily gifted in artistic matters, particularly poetry and drama, fast breeding and unusually aggressive when it came to the universe and their place in it. Humans and the Covandu frequently found themselves fighting for the same undeveloped real estate. Cova Banda, in fact, had been a human colony before it had been a Covandu one, abandoned after a native virus had caused the settlers to grow unsightly additional limbs and homicidal additional personalities. The virus didn't give the Covandu even a headache; they moved right in. Sixty-three years later, the Colonials finally developed a vaccine and wanted the planet back. Unfortunately, the Covandu, again all too much like humans, weren't very much into the whole sharing thing. So in we went, to do battle against the Covandu.
The tallest of whom is no more than one inch tall.
The Covandu are not so stupid as to launch their tiny little armies against humans sixty or seventy times their size, of course. First they hit us with aircraft, long-range mortars, tanks and other military equipment that might actually do some damage—and did; it's not easy to take out a twenty-centimeter-long aircraft flying at several hundred klicks an hour. But you do what you can to make it difficult to use these options (we did this by landing in Cova Banda's main city's park, so any artillery that missed us hit their own people) and anyway, eventually you'll dispose of most of these annoyances. Our people used more care destroying Covandu forces than they typically might, not only because they're smaller and require more attention to hit. There's also the matter that no one wants to have been killed by a one-inch opponent.
Eventually, however, you shoot down all the aircraft and take out all the tanks, and then you have to deal with the individual Covandu themselves. So here's how you fight one: You step on him. You just bring your foot down, apply pressure and it's done. As you're doing this, the Covandu is firing his weapon at you and screaming at the top of his tiny little lungs, a squeak that you may just be able to hear. But it's useless. Your suit, designed to apply brakes on a human-scale high-powered projectile, barely registers the bits of matter flung at your toes by a Covandu; you barely register the crunch of the little being you've stomped. You spot another one, you do it again.
We did this for hours as we waded through Cova Banda's main city, stopping every now and then to sight a rocket on a skyscraper five or six meters high and take it down with a single shot. Some of our platoon would spray a shotgun blast into a building instead, letting the individual shot, each big enough to take a Covandu's head clean off, rattle through the building like mad pachinko balls. But mostly, it was about the stomping. Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster, who had been undergoing his umpteenth revival as I left the Earth, would have felt right at home.
I don't remember exactly when it was I began to cry and kick skyscrapers, but I had done it long enough and hard enough that when Alan was finally called over to retrieve me, Asshole was informing me that I had managed to break three toes. Alan walked me back to the city park we'd landed in and had me sit down; as soon as I did, some Covandu emerged from behind a boulder and aimed his weapon at my face. It felt like tiny grains of sand were plunking into my cheek.
"God damn it," I said, grabbed the Covandu like a ball bearing, and angrily flung him into a nearby skyscraper. He zoomed off, spinning in a flat arc, decelerated with a tinny thunk when he hit the building, and fell the two remaining meters to the ground. Any other Covandu in the area apparently decided against assassination attempts.