Hunted

by MJ Kobernus

Stephanie felt a momentary irritation at that. His blonde Nordic locks were not even mussed.

  “Assuming that the Endurance is in range now,” he said, hands reaching out to flick switches, “it will take a couple of hours at least before another shuttle can reach us.”

  He donned his headset. “This is the shuttle Heimdal. Endurance, do you read?”

  No signal. He tried again, then threw off his headset. His sigh told Stephanie everything she needed to know. Instantly she turned and hit a switch marked EPIRB. It was old tech but it would broadcast their position for as long as the ship had power. The Endurance might not be in range for some hours yet, but they could just sit tight and wait for pickup. She thanked her ancestors that the Heimdal had held together, coming down in one piece. It might even be salvageable. Whether it was testimony to Pål’s skill as a pilot or divine intervention was moot. She would light a joss stick once they were out of this mess.

  “How’s Jensen?” Knutsen asked, with a nod towards the hold.

  “Broken rib, looks like,” Stephanie replied. “Might have pierced a lung. Not good.”

  Knutsen levered himself out of his chair with a grunt and flexed his shoulders. “The gravity is higher than I expected.”

  “It’s only a little more than Earth normal. We’ve been running on three quarters gee for too long.”

  Knutsen shrugged noncommittally and crawled through the hatch into the fuselage. Stephanie followed and clambered down into the hold. Knutsen stopped in shock at the sight of the mutant and the two dead crewmen, hanging limp from the wall.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Jensen had used some of the strapping to wrap around his chest. He was pulling it tight, wincing with the pain. Stephanie stepped forward, helping him tie it off. He had evidently come to the same conclusion as she had; broken ribs. Knutsen glanced in his direction, giving him a quick once over, before returning his gaze to the mutant.

  “You going to be okay, Jensen?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  “These things attacked you?” he asked, nodding towards the alien. “Unprovoked?”

  “We didn’t even know they were there until they started killing us.”

  Knutsen shook his head in wonder. The Argoss was known to have had a major tech failure, but to find out that it had been caused deliberately made sense only if the mutants had posed a serious threat to the mission. The captain may have reasoned that it was better to preserve the arc for the other colonists, than let it fall prey to the mutated crew. If every living thing on board was killed, then the ship would arrive at its final destination and wait there, hale and whole until the other arcs arrived. And this was just what had happened. Except the mutants had evidently survived.

  From the cockpit, a shrill siren sounded. With a nod, Knutsen ordered Chu to check it out. Stephanie crawled back into the cockpit. Almost immediately she was back, her face drained of its natural color.

  “Pål! You’d better get in here, now.”

  Knutsen crawled back into the cockpit. Stephanie pointed to a series of readouts on the port side of his station where the lights had changed from green to yellow. The drive was not dead. It was going critical.

  His eyes widened at the sight, but he wasted no time trying to reverse the problem. There was no fix for this. He leaned in towards Stephanie, speaking loudly in order to be heard over the incessant siren.

  “Get everything out that we can carry. We need to make it to the minimum safe zone. I don’t know how much time we’ve got, but I’m not taking any chances.”

  Stephanie nodded, pulling a medkit from a bulkhead. She made her way into the hold where she punched in the code to open the weapons locker. Knutsen followed, pushing two emergency kits with him. The kits contained basic field rations for three days, a small amount of water and foil blankets.

  Stephanie slung the heavy multigun—the same she had used to defend the airlock against the mutants—over her shoulder. It was designed to be used in any situation and could be configured for a variety of lethal and non-lethal payloads. She checked to ensure that it was set to High-Charge, a killing level.

  Through either luck, or judgment on Knutsen’s part, the shuttle had come to rest on its belly. The airlock should be the easiest exit but a quick glance through the porthole showed only the fine red sand of Palsenz covering the tempered glass. The hatch was clearly buried.

  That left only one way out, the payload doors. Stephanie hit the release mechanism, then punched in her authorization code. With a groan, the ceiling began to split, widening as the overhead hatches opened outwards like the ribs of a great beast, splayed to reveal the tender organs within.

  Instantly a fierce wind carried sand into the bay, whipping around in a frenzied gyre. Stephanie turned to Jensen who was helping himself to a multigun.

  “We need to get as far away from the shuttle as we can. The drive is overloading. Take this medkit and start climbing.”

  She passed him the medical supplies and pointed to the far end of the bay where handholds set into the bulkheads formed a ladder. Jensen nodded, slinging the rifle over one shoulder and medkit over the other. He made his way past his dead crew and the mutant, giving the latter a slightly wider berth, then began to climb, head turned to the side to avoid the stinging sand.

  Stephanie watched Jensen climb, noting how he struggled to raise his right arm. Not good. Knutsen appeared at her shoulder and she jumped.

  “Hell, you gave me a start.”

  His answering look held no apology. He just pushed her towards the ladder. She understood. No time to waste on pleasantries. She scaled the ladder quickly, climbing out, turning her head from the caustic wind and the tiny sand grains needling her face.

  She slid down the fuselage, onto the stubby wing of the shuttle, then jumped, landing next to Jensen. The jolt when she hit the ground almost knocked the wind out of her. Nevertheless, she slapped Jensen on the shoulder and tried her best to give him a smile.

  “Congratulations, Officer Jensen. You’re the first man to set foot on Palsenz.”

  He nodded, but did not look like he appreciated the distinction as he was trying to shield his eyes from the sand. Equally, Stephanie did not feel anything special for being the first woman on the planet. If they survived, maybe then.

  A moment later and Knutsen joined them. They set off, making their way through twisted rocks that coiled and spired at odd angles, many of the fingers of stone ending in points, like granite daggers. Care was needed. A fall here could be deadly.

  The wind howled, almost drowning out her voice. Nevertheless, Stephanie attempted to shout above it. “How far to be safe?”

  Knutsen strained to hear. He grimaced as he worked out the meaning of the almost jumbled words that came to him.

  “At least three kilometers,” he shouted in reply, holding up three fingers.

  Stephanie nodded and leaned into the wind, pushing hard to make progress. It would have been smarter to go the opposite direction where the wind would help propel them, but the almost sheer wall of stone that lay there contradicted that instinct. Had the shuttle changed its angle of descent by just a tiny margin, they would have impacted the cliff face, and that would have been that.

  They began their trek away from the shuttle. After some time, Stephanie found she could walk naturally, no longer needing to lean into the wind. She checked her wrist display, measuring their progress. Barely two klicks. That was not far enough!

  They pushed on. Finally, a break in the wind allowed them to observe their surroundings in more detail. With the sand no longer menacing her eyes, Stephanie raised her head. There was a rocky outcrop nearby and she quickly clambered up before turning to survey the horizon, marveling at the vista of an alien planet. Home.

  What she saw was a bleak, forbidding landscape of rolling red sand dunes and oddly striated rocks that rose from the ground like bony fingers. It was like a garden of stone, she thought.

  She turned
to look back the way they had come. Already their footprints had been erased and the shuttle was no longer in sight. She felt a pang of regret for its loss. She and Pål Knutsen had been assigned to the Heimdal as cadets and it had practically been home to them. Like many co-workers, they had taken their relationship to another level, becoming lovers. It was common for those who worked in close proximity to marry and have children. Any stigma that had once existed had long since disappeared within their insular culture where perpetuating the species was more important than outmoded social mores. Of course, this did not mean that there was not a chain of command. Stephanie was First Officer on the Heimdal, but it was Pål who had made Captain. That meant his word was law, even here, on the planet’s surface.

  “Orders, Captain?”

  “Our first priority is to get out of the blast zone, which I believe we have done. Next is shelter. I think these sand storms might get rough.”

  Jensen smiled grimly at that. “Not much shelter here, by the looks of things.”

  “No,” Knutsen conceded. “We’ll just have to keep moving and hope we get lucky.”

  From her vantage point, Stephanie could see further than the others. Her brows furrowed. “I can see something.” She pointed to the east. The others turned to look. “Something glinted. Like a reflection off glass.”

  “Must be wreckage from the Heimdal,” Knutsen asserted.

  “No,” she replied. “Not that far east. It