The Failed Creeper-Hunting Expedition

The Failed Creeper-Hunting Expedition, also called the snipe hunt, is a security operation that turns a planned sweep for hostile creatures into a retreat under attack. Ordered by Marshall after the first encounters with creepers, it is intended both to locate and clear the creatures around the colony and to bring a specimen to Dugan for study. Instead, the expedition loses Dugan and other Security personnel, recovers only part of a creeper, and leaves the larger threat unresolved. Its failure marks a sharp contrast between the colony’s confidence in its military response and the danger—and nature—of the life it is trying to control.

Orders and Objectives

Marshall gives the order after Berto Gomez confirms that Mickey Barnes had not uploaded for some time before going down the previous night. Having decided that the colony has more urgent concerns, Marshall directs Berto Gomez and Nasha to provide air cover. He orders a complete ground-penetrating-radar sweep from the dome to two thousand meters beyond its perimeter, with the aim of determining how many creatures are present and where they are. He also tells the pilots to load their missile tubes and orders the field cleared of creepers to at least a kilometer once the team has completed its work and extracted its people.

The foot team is told to leave through the auxiliary lock fifteen minutes later. Marshall’s scientific objective is as concrete as his military one: Dugan needs a specimen in his laboratory to study what the creatures are and what they can do. The mission therefore combines reconnaissance, extermination, and collection, treating the creepers as a threat to map and remove and as material to examine. Marshall’s ghoulish grin as he names the outing a snipe hunt gives the order a note of grim irony: the team is being sent after creatures whose numbers and behavior it does not yet understand.

The Attack in the Snow

The operation’s central encounter begins when Dugan lifts his right leg and reveals a small creeper clinging to it. Its pointed feet have made divots in his armor, while its mandibles work at the seam behind his knee. The two Security personnel flanking him turn their burners on the creature. At first Dugan appears to encourage them, but the armor heats and softens without stopping the attack. The creeper digs its legs deeper as steam rises from the snow; Dugan’s yelling becomes screaming and then a wordless shriek.

Mickey runs for a nearby granite outcrop, but snowshoes make the escape clumsy. He falls face-first into the snow, expecting a creeper to reach him, until Cat Chen catches his arm with a powered gauntlet and hauls him upright. She urges him onward and shoves him toward the rock. Behind them, Dugan disappears, apparently dragged beneath the snow. The two Security personnel remain standing only briefly: creepers have attached themselves to them as well, and Mickey sees them go down.

On a granite island about three meters across and half a meter above the snow, Mickey gets the linear accelerator over his shoulder and aims at a creeper that surfaces almost within reach. The weapon’s recoil drives him back into Cat Chen as the first three segments of the creature explode. The kill gives the retreating pair a fragment of the sample Dugan was meant to obtain, but it does not make the ground safe: the other Security personnel are down, and Mickey can still see movement beneath the snow.

Extraction and the Incomplete Sample

Berto Gomez arrives in the flitter, whose rising gravitics announce it before twin spotlights pick out Mickey and Cat Chen, then the place where Dugan and the others disappeared. When Berto asks over the comm whether they have a sample, Mickey reports that they have part of one. He jumps from the rock to retrieve the remains, climbs back up, and hands the fragment to Cat Chen so she can secure it while he attaches the grapple to her armor.

As Berto lifts them, the granite top becomes crowded with creepers. They are barely inside the cargo bay when Nasha comes in low and fast, having already launched two missiles. The bay door closes, and the flitter rises away amid the expanding plasma. The team escapes with a fragment rather than the intact specimen sought for Dugan’s laboratory; the planned sweep and clearance have given way to extraction under fire. The operation’s one tangible scientific gain is inseparable from its human cost and its failure to establish control over the surrounding field.

What the Expedition Could Not See

The earlier encounters had already shown that creepers did not fit a simple picture of small, snow-white pests. Mickey had encountered a giant creature with a segmented body, paired legs, claws, feeding limbs, and two pairs of mandibles, unlike the ordinary creepers he knew. That immense animal had carried him through the tunnels and left him near a passage sealed by hard-packed snow. The hunting expedition, by contrast, is attacked by the smaller creatures—the kind that took Dugan and had torn through the main-lock floor. The difference in scale does not mean the smaller ones are harmless; their coordinated attack overwhelms the armed team.

The limitations of the mission’s understanding become still clearer when Mickey later sees a still image of a broad, deep cavern in which every square meter is covered in smaller creepers. The image offers a measure of their numbers that the isolated attacks at the surface could not. Later, when Marshall frames the conflict in terms of deaths on both sides, Mickey argues that the creepers do not appear to understand individual life as humans do. He interprets them as a communal intelligence and the smaller creatures as ancillaries—parts of a whole, not independent intelligent beings. From that perspective, the expedition’s killing and specimen collection do not carry the meaning humans assume they do.

The hunt thus fails on more than its immediate military terms. The team kills a creeper and escapes with a fragment, but Dugan and Security personnel are lost, the wider population remains present, and the operation does not establish that the creatures can be understood as individual targets in a conventional war. Its violence becomes part of the evidence behind Mickey’s later insistence that the humans may be misreading the conflict itself.