New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

knew the water bags were safe, he could
slow down and savor the moment.
He rested the mouth of his gun on the
creature’s translucent head. It was important
to refrain from shooting fools and crazies,
because he could lose all the pay of that day
and his time. “My first prey,” he thought
cheerfully. “Let’s see what the fuckers at the
base say today. Shit! Eight hundred
megacredits for this hide, at least.”
He delivered the final shot, with the
elegance and calmness of a veteran.
The beast gave a deafening sigh, as if the
pan flute had been accidentally crushed and
broken into a thousand tiny bits.
“Shut up now!” shouted Miles as he
covered his ears.
“I wish these creatures would die in
silence,” he thought with a grimace. “But I
suppose it’s too much to ask.”
With the tips of his metal-toed boots,
which were as hard as knives, he touched the
creature lying dead at his feet. A trickle of
water ran across the earth. Almost nothing.
Then the silence fell. An absolute,
devastating silence.
The moaning shrubs on the planet
stopped wailing. His boots sank into the
leaf-covered ground. Metallic creaking. He
made clicking sounds with his tongue as he
wiggled it, restless, inside his mouth. But
nothing else.
A shiver ran down his spine and his
scrotum tightened. He needed human
company soon, even if it was only those
idiots at the base. He needed to be safely
away from this silent graveyard.
“Who knows? Maybe we do kill off
whole species,” he thought. “Perhaps I’ve
just killed the last of its kind.” He grimaced,
not convinced of his own words.
But anyway, what did it matter? Those
were the arcane laws of survival. No one
would judge the Earthlings for expanding
their domain beyond the boundaries of outer
space.
It was simple: men had turned out to be
the creatures most likely to survive in the
war of conquest, while the indigenous
inhabitants on that planet scurried to hide
like scared rabbits in their bubble holes.
Humans had simply hunted the rabbits and
seized their world.
Big fish eat little fish.
Miles did quick mental math. The
Imperial Wrecks of the Earth had explored
the galaxy for centuries in search of some
intelligent being. In all that time, only ten of
the discovered worlds contained the miracle
of life. A lifeform very different from the
one the conquerors had expected: arboreal
pygmies, mutant animals covered with
scales, insectoids that possessed double
larynges and emitted the most incredible
dodecaphonic sounds, feline Siamese twins
that mated at all hours and everywhere.
Miles did the math. “We wipe them out. The
end.”
“A hunter never trembles before his
prey,” he reminded himself as his game’s
considerable weight almost caused his knees