skonen_blades

It was the tails that gave them away.

A lot like the ostriches back on earth. Those big birds would stick their heads in the sand and think that they were hiding, safe from hunters. They weren’t.

Here on this interminable pink planet, we were clearing the inhabitants. There were squat creatures with long tails.

Every time they hid, they’d stick their long pink tails up straight in the air like flags at a golf course. Herding them was easy.

I wasn’t sure if it was because they had no feeling in the tips of their tails, that they had no awareness of the tips of their tails, or that they were just plain stupid but I was starting to lean towards the third option.

Policy: Shoot one in front of the others so that they understand what our weapons do, then walk towards them. They back up right into the nets.

The whole operation is taking less time than expected. There’s usually a token rebellion or a smart couple of natives that spontaneously develop the ability to plan before the Full Clearing is done but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this time.

They’ll be shipped off to other worlds as pets. If they turn out to be edible, they’ll be bred to be used up as protein rations. If they turn out to be edible and palatable, they’ll be bred as delicacies for off-world gourmets in fancy restaurants.

When I mentioned before that this planet was pink, I wasn’t doing it justice. The planet is all shades of pink. There are shades of pink here that I never want to see again. There is an unending palette of pinks that somehow never creeps over fully into the colours of red or purple. The sunsets, the translucent lakes, the trees, the grass, the little guys we’re hunting, even the god damned ground.

The experts are happy because they think that a lot of the crystal deposits might be diamonds, making this a very valuable planet indeed. Not that I’ll ever see any of that money.

I shoot a concussion flash straight up. When it goes off, I can see two hundred golf-flag tails quiver in the bushes around me. Here we go.

Two more months to go.




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I wouldn’t even call it murder.

Those beings had all of the self-preservation instincts of a wet sock. I think they ended up becoming the dominant life-form on that out-of-the-way planet just because there was never anything to oppose them.

They didn’t fight their way to the top of the food chain. They sauntered. Slowly.

Fat and affectionate little creatures, vegetarians, and possessing a wide variety of colours that seemed to have no effect on mate choice or camouflage. They seemed to be pretty and colourful for the sheer joy of being pretty and colourful. They had no fear.

They had lots of sex in between naps. As far as we could tell, that was the entirety of their social structure.

The whole planet surface was covered in the soft, green weeds that they fed off of. It was a loamy bed, plentiful enough to sustain the population no matter how big it got. The mountains weren’t high and the oceans weren’t deep. It was a simple ecology that the experts back on Prime would have said was too simple to be possible but there it was.

The creatures were tasty and trusting. Kind of a bad combination, really. Historically speaking, I mean. You’d think we would have learned from the Dodo, the cow and the chicken but you know how it goes.

The planet was cleaned out in a decade. Their meat went from plentiful to a delicacy to endangered to rumour. The weeds, with nothing to control them, quickly ran rampant to the point that their own waste gases choked the atmosphere into a thick fog that was baked by their system’s sun.

The plants died, the atmosphere burned off, and it became a rock in the shape of a planet.

There are rumours of cloning farms that rescued small samples of the wee beasts and serve them to the super-rich in mythical restaurants.

Maybe true. I don’t know. I remember them, though. Delicious.




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