by Nick Cole
As for the settlement…
It was as though nothing had ever been there. It was like driving across the surface of a dead and airless moon that had been charbroiled. And then, two thousand meters later there was just flaming desert weed and prickleflower for us to disappear into.
The Seeker pointed us toward the track that led off the Eighty-Eight and down into the bowl of the eastern Wastes’ lowest points. The terrain down there was lost in a chalky heat haze that shimmered and sparkled due to the vast mineral deposits and strange features that were characteristic of the post-Crash desert.
The Kid was at the wheel. I studied what we were getting ourselves into, wondering how many I’d get killed down in there where an alien starship had once fractured the crust of this world. Maybe even myself. Maybe I’d even get me killed. And then I gave the Kid the signal to go into it. To take us to whatever we’d been headed toward all along. Whether we liked it or not.
We were on our way, and I was hoping for good things, but expecting worse. Which is the lot of NCOs.
Same as it ever was.
So it will ever be until the heat death of the universe.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’ve been to a lot of worlds. Driven across vast stretches of endless weirdness that bore little resemblance to the place I first started out on. Or even any of the worlds I might have called familiar. Being a mercenary boils down to this… go to strange and interesting worlds, sometimes stations or starships, and kill people. So let’s just say I have a broad depth of experience in places where people pay to have you conduct warfare on their behalf. Having said that, the Crash Wastes had some of the weirdest terrain features I’d ever seen in my too short, yet felt very long, life. Over thirty-six hours into this op and I felt like an old man. Older than Stinkeye who seems long-lived due to Monarch Dark Lab experimentation. The Wastes made Crash the weirdest world I’d been on by far.
We drove until darkness came again and the three moons of this world began their bizarre dance across the big sky. All of us crammed into the last remaining Mule. We stopped as much as we could for everyone to get out, stretch their legs, and try to make the best of a long and uncomfortable journey by rearranging what could be as best they could.
You can only rearrange so much. It is what it is, as some like to say on Symbala. Sometimes you just have to count distance and hours, and suffer silently, happy you’ve still got your life, whereas the trail of dead comrades you’ve left behind… currently don’t.
It’s best to be honest about the state of things.
There were conversations on these long stretches across the desert silence that began, over comm, between myself and the Monarch, as we drove deeper and deeper out into the weirdness of a wasteland ruined by a falling alien starship long ago. Because I now realize the importance of the Crash Wastes, I’ll put down what’s there. What’s in that vast and fractured land, ruined by a stellar intruder long ago. What we passed through, and what I think it is. And of course, as much as the Monarch was able to tell me, so if anyone is reading this account and coming to their own conclusions about what really happened, and what needs to be done about it, well, then they can follow the trail I’m leaving here and now. That’s been the purpose of what I’m putting down here all along. Why I’ve carved it out of the main logs of Strange Company for consumption by whoever finds it. I’ll figure out some way to get it out, some kind of transport or even signal headed toward Astacia Esquival, the company rep for our legal firm. Lawyer. Accounts. She does a lot. I hope they appreciate her. She seems like the kind of person who’ll do the right thing come hell or high water. But then again, what do I know. I’ve never met her in person. She just seems like the type.
Maybe I’m an optimist that way. Maybe some detail I’m putting down is important to whoever needs to clean up this mess that started out on Crash and got us what we couldn’t get out of even if we wanted to. For the record. Maybe they can make things right.
Whatever “right” is anymore.
So… what is the Crash?
The Crash. Not a crash. Proper noun. And not to be confused with the planet, which got named second. After. Because of.
The Crash.
The first scout to reach this world, Amos Ferragamo, piloting a Comet-class vessel, Model 301, swept the system with sensors shortly after jumping in. Alarm bells went off and that old scout, Amos Ferragamo, got some huge pings and interesting data right off the bat. Sensors detected a huge nuclear heat spike on the surface of the fourth world in from a star no one had been much interested in. The system was coreward, toward the galactic center, which was the focus of human expansion about that time, right about when we, humanity, encountered the No, a nasty bunch of cybernetic organisms on Sirius. But this area hadn’t been surveyed much and so it was worth the investigation and attention of one lonely scout.
The No. Not as in Negative. That’s what they called themselves during the first invasion of the colony worlds. History calls them the No Cybarbarians. The No gave humanity their first really big interstellar war, and genocides. For about ten years there it looked like we were going over the hill and into ancient history.
The nuclear signature was interesting to old Amos as he set up the glideslope approach in the cockpit of his scout ship to this strange new world he’d discovered. Jump drive exit put him two months out from orbital insertion, and he spent that two months running scans, developing system hazard maps, and plotting the approach. Which is probably about the most dangerous thing you can do as a scout explorer. More scouts have died approaching unknown worlds than down planetside facing unknown dangers on the ground.
But that’s why they get paid the big bucks, or so I’ve heard them say.
Amos knew he was on to something because that fourth world was Earth-like, and apparently inhabited, if that nuclear signature was any indication. But the closer he got the more dismayed he became by what seemed like conflicting data from both sensors and scopes. Nuclear reaction would indicate a definite Tech Seven level of development. Minimum. That should mean major megapoli, rudimentary starflight, satellites at the least. Big navigational hazards those are. And of course, mandatory radio communication. He was getting none of those things on scanners or comm as the scout hurtled itself toward this unknown world on full-burn dumbthrust. The sensor sweep was only picking up the nuclear signature. And nothing else. Nada. Nope. Everything was real quiet. No signs of cities or civilization of any kind. He spent a week theorizing that possibly he was encountering a civ that did things much differently and couldn’t be measured by the standard Dyson Tech Tree classification. Perhaps they were underground? Or maybe he was looking at a dead civ that had somehow left the lights on in at least one nuclear reactor before they annihilated themselves. Both of those possibilities gave him cause for concern. Easy to get in way over his head in both of those situations. Booby traps and apex predators were top of the list to an old scout with nothing but a fast ship and a rifle. Underground dweller civs had proven to be particularly alien and nasty about intruders during past encounters. There was a reason they were underground, and it usually had a lot to do with paranoia and xenophobia. A dead civ, on the other hand, meant something had wiped them out. And if that something had wiped them out then why wouldn’t that something just wipe out old Amos out here trying to stake a discovery claim?
A month out, his scopes were getting a good look at the surface and he was seeing nothing that looked like civ. So, what was the nuclear signature, he must’ve wondered. Volcano with a vent deep down into the crust? Perhaps even way down into the magma of the world’s core? That might do it. He got a good look at the target site five days out as he set up for the orbital insertion glide path to take him straight down through atmo, then go to thrusters for supersonic flight direct over the target area.
Those old scouts like the Comet 301, a delta wing strapped around a big old jump drive engine, didn’t have
a-grav. If Amos made a landing it was gonna be rough. Chances were, he wouldn’t walk away from it, much less even be able to take off afterwards. But Amos had ridden White Lightning, his Comet 301, down-planet on a dozen prior roller-coaster rides to surfaces on other undiscovered or barely discovered worlds. He was wily, and an addicted gambler. Two requisites for being a good scout. A good scout was someone who survived at least one world despite the risk to ship and life, and even the risk of permanent stellar castaway status. But discovering a world before anyone else was worth the danger. And the rewards were fantastic. First Holder rights, with direct payments set up by the Monarchs going forward. Add in an unusual world with something interesting, and you’ve got a hundred times the going rate. Enough to live like a potentate for the rest of your life on one of the pleasure rings.
So what Amos wanted was a good look at this supervolcano, or whatever it was, from at least as low as ten thousand feet during a flyby right over the top. His camera gear and sensors were all set up in White Lightning’s starboard wing stacks to record everything. As he came over the curve of the world, dropping down from orbit, he could see in the distance on the horizon that the target was obscured by black smoke. Even at one hundred ten thousand feet.
Probably just the volcano getting ready to explode, he must’ve thought, as he fired up the supersonic engines and redirected a power bleed from the jump drive to the forward ram shield to cut down on atmospheric chop, which was heavy. As he came in against the planet’s rotation to slow his groundspeed and get as much time as possible over the target before making his decision to find a landing area or go to thrusters full and try to reach orbit once more, he began to spot some of the more unusual features on this strange and undiscovered world.
There were three continents.
Two supers. Southern and northern hemispheres. The supervolcano, or whatever it was, on the northern continent. There’s also a third polar continent that extends out into the Chaotico Ocean. The island chains are there. But on this insertion, he was obsessed with the target area and the nuclear signature on the northern continent because even though he told himself in his heart it was some sort of natural phenomenon like a fissure that tapped the magma-filled core, he wasn’t convinced it was.
He had a feeling he was on to something unexpected. And he had to make sure.
Those unusual features were starting to reveal themselves by star-rise over this bizarre and undiscovered world as the Comet 301 streaked across the upper atmosphere, bleeding speed and altitude to make insertion over the world. If the ship began to burn up, he couldn’t even eject. He’d ditched that gear for more important sensors to help him thoroughly establish his claim.
A core fissure would have earned him the highest rate from the Monarchs. Or the corporations. The near-unlimited energy from a direct core tap would have turned Crash into an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse like Hella, the first of the Bright Worlds.
But like I said, he had a feeling there was something else going on as he saw the first of the fractures in the surface near the nuclear heat signature. Something amazing. Coming in against the rotation with as much sunlight as he could use, he spotted the first features upwards of two hundred miles away from the actual Crash. Massive cracks, rents, and fractures in the world he was racing over.
Before all that though was the feature he was just beginning to understand was the most bizarre. The supercontinent contained some kind of vast gentle crater, a huge depression in its central plain. And at its center, directly, was the nuclear signature source. This crater stretched thousands of miles across the northern continent. Within that crater the main landform type was alkaline salt desert. Wasteland. Typical of major impact strikes, but nothing the scout had ever seen or heard of had reached this level of destruction. The impact must’ve been huge. This crater was so vast, and as has been said, gentle, that it absorbed the entire central section of what must have once been a plateau that covered much of the continent. Sharp mountains and forested coastlands formed a line of demarcation all around its edges.
Some of what I’m putting down here was conjecture on the part of the author of a book I read about the whole thing. I was reading chapters here and there during the early days of the war here. Just to learn more about the world we were fighting on. Like I said, history is my jam. My happy place. It was a biography of Amos Ferragamo and the early discovery mystery surrounding Crash. When I got to this part, the flight over the Crash, I finished the rest of the book, which I’d been slowly working on for months, in one night.
Whatever it was that hit this world, it probably wasn’t a supervolcano because supervolcanoes don’t cause craters that big and keep burning. Probably a meteor strike, and the nuclear signature meant the meteor had most likely cracked the crust and mantle. Big Prizes, old Amos must’ve been thinking as he lost altitude and switched over to recording and scanning, flying the ship with one hand and trying to calibrate his mad hodgepodge of instruments with the other. Collecting data he’d use to verify the sale of the world’s rights and the price he would be entitled to. Again, he was dreaming of an industrial powerhouse like Hella as he threw out the aero brakes and tried to keep the ship stable for recording. With him owning vast shares in a corporation that would want a piece of this amazing world, he would have riches beyond imagining. That was the other option. You could take the Monarch payout and live easy. Or, you could sell to the corporations for stake and then live easy on the interest. Even maybe become a player. Who knew?
You were never gonna be a Monarch. That was for sure. No one is that dumb except maybe thirteen-year-old girls who think Prince Charming Monarch is going to come in and sweep them off their feet and make them one of humanity’s best. Just ’cause love.
Then he saw the Scar that had been carved out on the world below. That’s a feature off to the southeast of the Crash site. It’s the big one. There are others. Smaller ones. Cracks in the world that head off at odd angles. But the Scar was the first thing he spotted. It was huge. Immense. Conspiracy theorists have posited every explanation for it, right up to and including the claim that the alien ship fired some kind of beam weapon that was orders of magnitude more powerful than a D-beam strike, leaving the Scar as it went down. It’s twenty miles wide and a mile deep, the Scar. It runs for a thousand miles to the southeast. And it’s nothing but fused diamond.
Another theory is that when the ship came down in multiple pieces, the engines disconnected on reentry and exploded down the length of the Scar, creating an immense gash in the world. Still others say the ship must have come down in battle and the Scar is some impression left by a siege superweapon used to attack the ship once it was down planetside and trying to defend itself on the ground. The attackers couldn’t cross the surface and so they in effect used sappers to blast their way into the wreck in order to finally kill the crew.
That theory isn’t as wacky as it seems. Much of the weirdness, when you look at the Wastes, looks like the result of superweapons the Monarchs in their Dark Labs wish they could dream up.
And me looking at all this as the miles passed got me thinking, and so we began to talk.
The conversation between the Monarch and me began like this. We’d been driving in silence for two hours since we’d left the blackened remains of the outpost beyond the bridge over the Crack of Doom. We pulled over on the edge of a lake of boiling water that swirled hypnotic purple and spilled paint golds. The smell coming up off the lake and its many pools that stretched off into the distance was definitely sulfur. And something else. Something familiar, but something I couldn’t place at the time. I wondered, in fact, if I’d ever smelled it before, and why it seemed familiar. The murmur and pop of the bubbles was constant, and I was standing there near its vast edge spreading away into the chalky sunlight, staring down into the hypnotic swirls.
“There are lifeforms in there not catalogued on any known world,” said Hauser from behind me. Pig at
the ready and scanning the horizon. Belted ammo draped around his thick neck. The damage to his features had revealed the gleaming combat chassis underneath. He looked like a grinning skeleton on one side of his face. Hauser on the other. I concentrated on the Hauser part. We’d seen a flight of Ultra drops off in the distance a few hours back while we were on the road, heading toward the southeast. So, while we didn’t think we’d run into any out here, we knew they were around. That Ultra Marines were operational even in this region.
I didn’t respond to Hauser’s undiscovered lifeforms observation. He did that a lot. Lots of worlds had those. New lifeforms. The galaxy was a pretty busy place. But Crash had been settled long ago. There really shouldn’t have been any surprises. Research and exploration were pretty thorough on most worlds this developed. But then I remembered the Wastes were considered a permanent no-go zone.
Why?
Like so many things in the galaxy, if the Monarchs said so, you got used to not asking questions. Way above my pay grade. Not my monkeys, not my circus. The reasons not to question were almost hardwired into our DNA. If the Monarchs said so… it just was. No questions asked. For example, this world, currently being ravaged by deadly Ultra Marines, had asked why not? In their own way. As in why not govern ourselves?
Monarch Answer: D-beam strike. Death camps. Slaughter. Deleted from the stellar charts.
Probably by the time we made it back to the Spider that would be the case. If we made it back to the Spider.
“My scanners indicate they are silica-based, Sergeant Orion. Which is very… unusual. They are cephalopods. Their eyes, and most of them have at least seven thousand six hundred and twenty-eight, are emitting radiation at very low levels.”
Okay, that’s freaky, I thought. Not just the thousands of eyes, but… the radiation bit. Hadn’t heard of a lifeform that did that. And silica-based. I knew everything in the universe was generally carbon-based. So yeah, that also was unusual.