by Craig Allen
“I’ve been reading the reports,” she said. “I knew I was coming back, and I wanted to be ready.”
They stood together by the hatch. Cody wished they didn’t have to do this sort of mission anymore.
“You should stay,” she said. “You can come outside if any locals show up.”
Cody shook his head. “I’m going. I want to be there in case any locals show up. They’ll probably recognize me. They may not recognize you.”
She frowned. “You’re as bullheaded as I remember.”
“Likewise. But you’re still sexy.”
She jabbed him in the arm as she activated the rear hatch controls. As it cracked open, the wind blew by at an alarming speed. Cody had a hard time getting a read on anything with his suit, but magnetism was still as high as it had been before the change. With the massive amount of metallic elements in the planet’s crust, magnetism was always high. Ever since the Reed Entity initiated the change, it had gotten worse.
Cody pulled up a holoconsole near the exit. “Not reading any degradation inside the hopper. Looks like the medical field is keeping the bacteria away even with the door open.”
“Still want to flush the entire hopper when we’re done.” Sonja pointed. “The crash site is about fifteen meters that way. Check my tether, and I’ll check yours.”
“I love checking yours. You know that.”
“I’m serious, Cody.”
“I know.” Cody had thought most military used humor to make light of dangerous situations, but the look on Sonja’s face was the polar opposite of the one she’d had when they were lying in the cockpit with their clothes piled on the deck. She was worried, and with all the experience she had, Cody knew he should be worried too.
“Follow me.” Sonja stepped off the ramp. “My suit’s not detecting any life-forms in the immediate area.”
Cody scanned the menus on his enviro-suit’s system. Nothing, at least nothing living that they could see, was within half a kilometer of the hopper. Within half a meter, there wasn’t even bacteria.
Outside, the wind buffeted Cody, and he steadied himself. The wind was stronger than he thought, his suit registering it as well over one hundred kilometers per hour. Through gaps in the haze, he saw the sun low on the eastern horizon. He could barely make out the globular cluster less than two light years away from the system. Next to it in the sky hung, poetically, a full moon.
“Romantic,” Sonja said. “Huh?”
“Yeah.” Cody checked his tether, making sure it wouldn’t get hung up on the hopper gate. “Not exactly the place for a romantic stroll, though.”
“True.” Sonja pointed around the rear of the hopper. “No sign of degradation. Or maybe it takes a while.”
“The last few ships to leave Kali had been in the poisoned atmosphere less than a few minutes,” Cody said. “They had scarring along the front side of the hopper. The bacteria work fast. I’d say the field is working.”
“And it’s not eating our suits either.” Sonja held her arms out and looked herself up and down. “But let’s not stay longer than we have to.”
Cody took one last look at the hopper, hoping nothing outside would contaminate the interior. From what he could tell on his suit’s biometrics, bacteria filled the air all around but was virtually nonexistent inside.
He followed Sonja toward the coordinates laid out on his suit’s HUD, still worried about the mission. Everything on Kali was highly intelligent, even the bacteria from before the change. Dr. Donaldson of the Washington had said that enviro-suits had trouble filtering out native microscopic organisms in the long term, as if the microorganisms understood how the filters worked and attempted to get around them, which amazed Cody. Bacteria were far too small to have intelligence, much less self-awareness, but since all of them communicated with each other via magnetic waves, they had a shared intelligence, just like the native spider beetles Cody and Sonja had encountered when they first crash-landed a year before. That meant the bacteria might find a way to bypass the medical field at some point.
“Here we are.” Sonja stopped a few meters in front of Cody, which he could tell through the red haze only by the tracking lights on her suit. “My God.”
Cody joined her. Sitting partially buried in the ground was a hopper, or what was left of one. The rear bay was barely holding together. What was left of the hull was much thinner, and the interior grav plates were practically gone.
Along what was left of the outer hull crawled a reddish-orange ooze, like living custard. As they approached, the ooze flowed away from them, retreating toward the front of the hopper.
Cody stood by the pilot’s hatch, which had fallen to the ground below. It disintegrated as he stepped on it, and ooze shot out from under the door and scurried toward the far side of the hopper.
“My God.” Cody stepped back from the hopper. “The bacteria did a job on the hull.”
Sonja wandered around the side and peered through what was left of the canopy. “The pilots haven’t been touched.”
The cockpit had been altered and enlarged to accommodate the inhuman pilots, which were strapped down in seats modified to handle their shape. The extra space under the instrumentation panel allowed for the pilots’ massive legs to operate the pedals, and the stick and throttle were much closer to the cockpit seat than normal. The creatures were sprawled across the seats with lacerations that Cody assumed were from the crash. But even with the numerous wounds, the large heads that made up around a third of their bodies were still present.
“Toads.” Cody lifted his hand from the hull where he had been touching it, wondering if that had been a good idea. “Altered ones, though. They don’t have central arms or plates.”
“That means they work for the Reed Entity,” Sonja said. “Shit.”
Without the metallic plates around their heads, the toad pilots were blind to electromagnetic radiation. Their eyes were bigger than normal too, which helped them see the controls but went against the nature of how a toad viewed the world. It was like a dog without a sense of smell. It could function but would never feel the same.
“What the hell is that?” Sonja pointed through the canopy at a small passage leading to where the hopper bay had once been.
Cody didn’t see it, but before he could ask, Sonja darted around to the back of the hopper. The entire hopper groaned as she stepped on the remains of the deck.
“Sonja, wait.” He chased after her. “This thing is falling apart. It could come down on top of your head.”
Sonja knelt over a metallic sphere sitting between the seats. Her footprints had been left on the weakened metallic structure. The ooze pushed itself away until it left the hopper altogether.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Sonja nodded as she lifted it. “It’s an ex-mat container.” She tilted it so he could see the indicators on the side. “And it’s active.”
“Careful,” Cody said. “The bacteria could’ve damaged it. The exotic matter inside could leak out.”
“There’s no sign of damage.” Sonja turned over the half-meter-wide sphere. “If any of it leaked, it would’ve sunk to the center of the planet by now.”
Cody wasn’t a physicist, just a civilian translator. But he knew enough about the degenerate strange quark matter, commonly called exotic matter, to know that a cubic centimeter weighed hundreds of millions of tons. Although Daedalus engines didn’t need much more than ten milligrams to wrap an Alcubierre bubble around them and travel faster than light, that tiny amount was so small it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye and was thus so dense it would pass through the planet’s crust and vanish into the core, gone from human reach forever.
“Look.” Sonja pointed at the logo of Carmichael Flight, the company contracted by the government to make ex-mat chambers. “This is one of ours. Where’d these guys manage to get a hold of this?”
“Think they picked it up from the battle eight months ago? Remember about a third of the ex-mat necessary for th
e Kali ships was missing.” Cody pointed at the pod. “I’m guessing that’s part of what went missing.”
“Yeah, but it’s one of our ex-mat pods, not one the locals built.” Sonja searched the outside of the pod. “Why were these guys transporting this stuff? And where? And why didn’t we see them until the last minute?”
“Stealth drive?” Cody asked.
The Reed Entity had found a way to use the Alcubierre field generated by the Daedalus drive of an interstellar vessel to warp light all around the vessel, rendering it invisible. And since the Alcubierre field causally removed the vessel from normal space, gravimetrics could never detect the engines, no matter how fast the ship was going. The perfect stealth field, it had nearly destroyed an entire fleet of UEAF space vessels.
“We’re heading back,” Sonja said. “Admiral Jericho is going to want to know—”
The ground shifted, tilting a good twenty degrees to the left. Cody grabbed the edge of hatch, but it broke off in his hand and turned to dust. He slid away from the hopper.
“Sonja!” Cody searched for the tether controls on his suit. “Get out of here.”
“I’m trying, but… Oh shit.”
Cody glanced up. The remnants of the top of the hopper had caved in.
“Sonja!”
Below him, the ground was opening like a gigantic maw, and he was falling in.
He pulled up his suit’s controls and activated the tether. It retracted at once, dragging him up the incline, which had gotten steeper. Above his head, the crashed hopper began to slide toward him.
“Sonja, do you read me?”
A crack filled the air. His suit filtered out the noise so that it wasn’t deafening. A hole appeared in the hull, followed by another and another. Sonja punched through the section of roof that had collapsed on her and stood. She gripped one side of the hopper as it skidded down the hillside into the newly opened cavern.
“Retract your tether!”
She pointed behind Cody. “I did!”
Cody watched as her tether slithered away into their hopper, the end sliced through. The medical field should’ve protected their tethers as well, but for some reason, it hadn’t—or something else sliced the tether. He didn’t know which was worse.
Cody stopped his tether from retracting. He scooted to the side as the crashed hopper continued to slide down the hill. Sonja was on all fours, crawling out of the stern of it.
Cody gave himself more slack on the tether and lunged for her. He caught her by one forearm just as the hopper fell into the hole. In her other hand, she held the ex-mat chamber by a coolant pipe.
“Hope that pipe doesn’t break.” Cody activated his tether once more. “Hold on.”
Sonja gripped his forearm tightly as his tether retracted, pulling them both into their hopper. The disintegrating hopper below them broke apart as it rolled down the hillside into the cavern and fell God only knew where.
“The roof of the hopper collapsed and sliced my tether,” Sonja grumbled. “It’d be nice if one thing went right for a change.”
Cody wasn’t sure if this was the time for humor, especially when he looked up. The ground under their hopper was shifting, making it harder to reach the craft. Worse, the sky was darkening above them. At first, Cody thought that was a weather pattern of some kind, but then the dark shapes grew closer and spread out across the sky.
Each shape looked like a giant bat, but with a body so narrow that distinguishing the giant black wings from the body was hard, as if a whole creature were one flying wing. Dozens of them circled overhead like vultures.
“We could be in trouble,” Cody said.
They scrambled up the incline just as one of the creatures started to dive. With one free hand, Sonja drew her coil pistol and fired a short burst. The rounds sliced off one of the creature’s wings. The creature sailed past Cody’s head, missing by centimeters, and fell into the gaping maw below.
They reached the hopper’s rear hatch and scrambled up the ramp. The hopper continued to list, and Cody lost his footing. At the rate they were tilting, they’d get dumped out the back of the hopper.
“Magnetic boots,” Cody said.
He flipped them on, and his feet gripped the door of the hopper. Sonja did the same, and they both climbed inside, where the artificial gravity leveled everything out, at least from their perspective. The hopper was still tilting.
Sonja slammed the hatch controls. As the hopper sealed, she set the ex-mat in an empty seat in the hopper bay and activated the automated belting system. The seat straps awkwardly wrapped themselves around the pod, locking it in place.
“We’re out of here,” Sonja said. “Can’t believe the Reed Entity didn’t alter the bat-creatures.”
“They’re the most violent things around, next to the toads,” Cody said. “I guess the Reed Entity liked them just the way they were.”
Cody shut off his magnetic boots. He rushed forward and jumped into the co-pilot’s seat while Sonja brought the engines online. Around them, the edges of the ground appeared. They were inside the cave. In seconds, they’d be underground.
“No time for preflight,” Sonja said. “Buckle up.”
Outside the canopy, the bat-creatures darted away as soon as the engines came on. To creatures who sensed magnetism, the magnetic pulses coming from the grav engines acted like nails on a chalkboard at a hundred decibels, and the creatures vanished within seconds.
Sonja throttled up, and the hopper pushed its way forward a few meters then stopped.
“The hell is that?” Sonja brought up a rear camera on the HUD. “Oh Christ.”
Two red tentacles protruded from the ground, gripping the hopper by her landing struts.
Sonja slammed the throttle forward. The hopper vibrated violently then broke free and launched into the red haze. On the rear-camera view, a thick red tentacle hung from a landing strut. It flapped in the wind manically then came loose, vanishing quickly.
“They didn’t want us to go, that’s for sure,” Cody said.
“Why didn’t the medical field keep them off?” Sonja asked.
“It was designed to affect microscopic organisms, not full-sized locals.”
Red reeds flittered along the ground as the hopper gained altitude, then they sank back into the ground. The terrain evened up as Sonja leveled out. Cody shut off the rear camera.
Sonja pulled up the comm system. “Olympus Mons, this is Banshee One Eight. We are inbound, ETA—”
The hopper’s forward velocity slowed, and its nose pointed down. Sonja jerked back on the stick to right it.
“Damn it.” She grimaced as the hopper bounced around. “Olympus Mons, we’re experiencing extreme turbulence. Can you confirm?”
“Damn right we can.” Lieutenant Johnson swore. “Are you guys all right?”
Cody pulled up the hopper’s sensors. About fifty kilometers away, a whirlwind approached, with speeds far above any hurricane Earth had ever seen. And it was approaching the Olympus Mons as it danced back and forth.
Commander Gaston cut in. “There’s no way you can dock in this wind. Get your asses topside, and we’ll see you there.”
“Roger that.” Sonja jerked the stick back again.
The hopper spun in the wind as Sonja struggled to keep the nose pointed upward, the throttle all the way forward. Cody had no idea what the maximum acceleration of a hopper was, only that it was hundreds of g-forces. Without artificial gravity, the hopper’s acceleration would’ve turned their bones into powder.
Gravimetrics showed the Olympus Mons below, gaining on them. She had bigger engines than the hopper but was also much larger. She’d arrive in space later than they would, assuming the hurricane didn’t take them out.
“That hurricane is twenty kilometers away,” Cody said. “How can it move so fast?”
“Because that damn Reed Entity wants it to.” Gaston’s voice sounded strained. “We’ll be in the upper atmosphere in two minutes.”
Soon, the reddish
atmosphere was replaced by the blackness of space. Sonja continued to accelerate upward, as if terrified the planet itself would rush out to grab them.
Cody pulled up the rear cameras. The Olympus Mons continued to climb, but it wasn’t alone. Jellyfish hovered around all sides of the ship. They reached out with glowing tentacles, and where they touched the ship, it sparked.
“Olympus Mons to Tokugawa.” Gaston’s voice sounded calm despite the desperate situation. “Our systems are shutting down. Weapons offline. We could use some assistance.”
More crackling energy rippled across the hull, and the Olympus Mons’s engines wavered as her grav engines flicked on and off. At that rate, she would soon fall back into the atmosphere.
“We have to help,” Cody said.
“We are.” Sonja spun the hopper until the Olympus Mons was in view. She started to bring up weapons systems when a voice on the comm cut her off.
“Banshee One Eight.” It was the comm officer on the Tokugawa. “Adjust your course to two four six by two seven zero of your position.”
“Copy.” Sonja maneuvered the hopper upward and out of the planet’s atmosphere.
“What about the Olympus Mons?” Cody asked.
“Tokugawa has something in mind.”
The hopper’s sensors registered the Tokugawa’s weapon systems as they powered up. Her graser ports glowed for a second then released an induced gamma-ray emission toward the planet.
One jellyfish exploded into pieces, followed by a second. The other two jellyfish backed away at once, and the Olympus Mons rose from the atmosphere.
“Thanks for the assist, Tokugawa.” Gaston chuckled. “With all due respect, Admiral, I think we should leave this goddamn planet alone for a change.”
Cody couldn’t have agreed more.
~~~
Jericho’s subordinates stared at him after hearing the response from the Olympus Mons’s skipper, but Jericho only snickered. He agreed with the sentiment, and his current fear was the Spicans would use the incident as an excuse to nuke the planet until the crust glowed.
Jericho started to respond, but the comm officer gave a shout.