by Greg Dragon
To the horror of Helga and the other Nighthawks, Sundown cut his rockets and touched down. He bent over and placed his hands on the ground, and stood like that waiting for a time.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” Sundown said into comms after a minute had passed with him crouched and frozen, “I have experience with similar subterranean hunters that operate on sound or smell. Now, these szilocs live beneath us in a very deep and complex hive, similar to ants. Sounds from the surface attracts their hunters, but they use the same tunnels to travel, only punching holes in the surface to grab their prey. As you can see there are no holes about, even though we were attacked by so many. What that means is that they reseal their holes, so that future victims will remain unaware.”
“So what’s the plan then?” Quentin said, sounding every bit as impatient as he looked.
“Vibrations are everywhere, but particularly concentrated below the wreckage. I think that ship crash-landed in a most inconvenient place, directly above the heart of the hive. They burrowed a path below the one that we’re on, so they’ve been picking up on our footsteps instantly. We have two options from what I’m seeing here, Commander. We can take our trek through the jungle, and come around to either side of the crash site, or, we can collapse their tunnel, blinding them, and they would in time be forced to burrow another path. That would buy us at most a Vestalian day, and we can be gone before they pick back up the hunt. On your lead.”
“Let’s cut around,” Cilas said, quickly. “I don’t want to frig up this moon any more than these thypes we’re after have done. Knives out, and switch to cryo rounds. We want to suppress our action now that we’re within range of the lizard’s operation.”
“Should I drop a bumper?” Raileo said, referring to a device he carried that would pulse and make noise for several hours. Typically bumpers were thrown to distract the enemy in the field, but due to its patterned pulse, which would be thunderous to the senses of the szilocs, it would keep the hive occupied and distracted.
Cilas approved and they went to work, planting the bumper and plotting an alternate course to make it to the wreckage. Once they were set, he led them off the path and through several meters of trees before touching down on top of another strange stone pileup.
The trees all about them were tall, twisted, and speckled with glowing droplets of sap, and every branch was covered in a thick, drooping blanket of mossy growth. A multitude of roots, like rebellious tentacles, climbed up from the dirt to serve as obstacles for any foolish invader daring to walk.
The soil itself was a slurry of mud, making it practically impossible to move, so the Nighthawks were forced to once again rely on the rockets of their PAS.
Helga felt annoyed by Cilas’s decision. While she understood his respect of the natural life on the moon, the mission would be impeded if one of them suddenly found themselves fresh out of fuel.
Without everyone’s rockets powered enough to get them back to the Thundercat, they would be forced to navigate the misty basin and whatever apex predator ruled its domain. Whether that meant more burrowers didn’t matter, since none of them knew this moon enough to get ahead of potential threats.
Argan-10 was indeed beautiful, in much the same way an unknown alien flower could be considered beautiful, until you take a sniff only to find out too late that its scent is actually toxic and leads to death. That was what they were dealing with, a vicious terrain masked by its splendor and remoteness.
Preserving native lifeforms was noble; it was what they were taught as Alliance soldiers. But at the risk of conserving fuel? Oh, how she wanted to say something to him.
“The way is clearer further this way,” Quentin said, utilizing the tracker’s instinct he’d mastered as a Marine planet-buster. He was always comfortable in the bush, and Helga recalled how on Meluvia, he’d vanish for hours only to return having scouted kilometers ahead, dispatching any would-be ambushers.
Helga wished she had even a sprinkling of Quentin’s skills when it came to surface fighting. The man could vanish into the trees, and before the enemy knew it, he would be on them, employing the use of his wicked knife.
She noticed that unlike her, he seemed relaxed, happy to be out of the range of the szilocs. Maybe it was his excitement of being in the jungle, she considered. Either way, the pensive Quentin Tutt from before was gone, replaced by the tracker, eagerly taking point to guide them along.
There was so much vegetation, much of it too alien for Helga to know a local vine from a serpent. Bugs of a million varieties took to her armor, some trying in vain to burrow through the metal, and some sort of animal was following them from the branches, but it was too dark for her to see what it was.
It felt like mere minutes had passed since the first sziloc attacked Helga and pinned her to the ground, but it had been two hours since they exited the Thundercat, and the skies were getting darker by the minute.
Helga pulled up a map on her HUD, but since Argan-10 was not in their system, all she could make out was the terrain in their immediate vicinity. It was Meluvia all over again, even down to the damp vegetarian making it difficult to proceed. But Quentin had picked up the pace, and she trusted him more than her helmet’s computer, which was throwing out educated guesses as to what was coming up.
When she was at her limit with their creeping stalker, she growled and raised up her auto-rifle, peering through its superior laser sights to get an idea of who or what was the shadow.
Sundown used a hand to slowly bring her weapon down, before stepping in close and pointing towards Quentin. Helga followed his finger to where the big man was stepping out into another clearing.
“I’m using the scope’s night vision, Sunny. I wasn’t going to shoot it. Do you think me that dumb?” she said, turning on him now, annoyed at him questioning her actions.
It was an odd interruption to what she and the other navy personnel would have known to be a routine check of her surroundings. Sundown being a Jumper, however, hadn’t been with them long enough to pick up on this, and she could see from his slightly wounded expression that he regretted having touched her gun.
“Look there,” Raileo said, suddenly. “What in the twelve planets are those?”
The rest of the Nighthawks turned to see what he was pointing at, and that was when they saw where the ship was wedged in among the trees. All around it in a neat circle were the corpses of szilocs. It looked as if someone was using them to create a wall, but on closer inspection they saw that the creatures were not dead, just sluggish.
“Sound off, Nighthawks, what am I looking at?” Cilas said.
“They have a stasis field generator on the top of the ship,” Raileo said, pointing to the large, disc-shaped vessel wedged in amongst a set of bent and broken trees. It had been there long enough for nature to make it a part of the moon, and the vegetation that now grew on it made it appear as a mossy outcropping of stone. The only telltale sign of it being alien to Argan-10 was the pulsing red light of the generator that Raileo was showing them. “See, it’s the same kind we use for camping, though they’ve tweaked it to weaken anything that makes contact instead of rejecting them outright like ours.”
“This seems unnecessarily cruel,” Sundown said, and Helga had to agree as she watched the szilocs twitch with about as much effort as they could manage.
“Sounds like Geralos,” Quentin said.
“Or our pirate psychopaths,” Helga muttered. “Nothing about this comes off as Geralos to me. I was in one of their camps; they don’t waste time on concocting random schtill like this. No, this comes from people stuck down here bored, with a deep hatred for these crab things. Maybe this ship was stolen and shot down above this moon. Pirates don’t have the Alliance to call for help when they get into trouble, and out here where they’ve been preying on merchant ships, their allies would be few. They would be thyped.”
“Pirates? Is that what’s inside that ship?” Quentin said, not even trying to hide his disappointment.
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��Now, hold on, we’re just speculating,” Cilas said. “The mission is to get inside there, to learn who or what has been using that thing. Our leaders suspect Geralos, and they seem pretty confident that the lizards are operating down here. For all we know, the pirates were the ones to set this up, but the lizards could have come later and taken it over, turning it into one of their feeding camps.”
“And how do we get in?” Helga said, replacing her pistols and reaching back once again for her cryo-loaded auto-rifle.
“Drop in from the top, ma’am. The field is only generated by those four poles,” Raileo said, using his wrist-comms to quickly draw a diagram that he then pushed to the rest of their HUDs.
“Ah, so it is like the barriers we use for camping,” Helga said. “Can you power it down? It would be one heck of a distraction if they suddenly had a storm of crabs trying to cut into their hull.”
“Szilocs,” Sundown corrected her, but she ignored him and looked at Cilas for confirmation.
“Shut it down, Ray,” Cilas said. “We need this area open in case we need to escort any survivors out or call reinforcements in to help us.”
Raileo Lei retraced their steps, then took another route to gain the back of the downed ship, pulsing his rockets to speed up his pace, then flying up and over the tree line to land inside of the perimeter near the generator. The rest of the Nighthawks watched him with their weapons primed, halfway expecting something to go off the rails and risking the young chief’s life.
It took fifteen minutes for him to crack open the stasis generator to reveal the vulnerable controls. Upon Cilas’s command, he rejoined them near the depression that had been made when the ship crash-landed. After a brief countdown as they hovered, Raileo fired a bullet into the generator’s controls, causing it to spark and power down.
Almost immediately the ground exploded with szilocs, freed and raving mad at anything within their vicinity. Not even their own number was spared the deadly lashing out of limbs, and several went down screaming from their wounds. Once they were recovered, however, they moved like a well-coordinated cavalry on the ship.
Szilocs scrambled up its sides, slamming forelegs into the hull, screaming out in a cacophony of earsplitting shrills, as they attacked what they perceived to have been the cause of their stasis prison. Helga was stunned by the sheer number of creatures. There were hundreds that had been at the perimeter, but now more were climbing up out of the ground, joining their fellows.
“We would never have survived without PAS,” she muttered to no one in particular.
“Can you imagine?” Cilas said.
“I really don’t want to,” Helga said, looking disgusted.
“Alright, we need to move. Let’s get on that thing and find a hatch that will allow us to gain the interior,” Cilas said. “If there’s anyone alive inside, they should be losing their schtill right now over the sudden attack from those creatures. We need that chaos to keep them sleeping, and the longer we wait, the higher the chances that some smart lizard commander will get wise to the distraction.”
“There’s a hatch near the top there, Commander,” Raileo said, pointing to an off-colored block on the far side of the saucer, which was the taller side of the tilt, well above the tree line.
Cilas didn’t answer; he just took off towards it, showcasing his mastery of the PAS. Helga was up and after him as fast as she could, and as a unit the Nighthawks soared, leaving the szilocs and the rocks to land on the more familiar surface of a hull. The hatch was standard for a Genesian-built ship, so Cilas and Quentin were able to start working on the controls.
Helga scanned the skies about them for drones or any other sort of surveillance that would alert the Geralos of their approach. Sundown walked the length of the hull to where the szilocs were scrambling over one another to get over to where they were, and powered on his las-sword before holding it out to one side.
He drew an invisible line in front of him and when the first sziloc crossed, he began to twirl one way and then the other, lopping off the legs of the first eager violators. Fifteen of them went down by the time Cilas got the hatch open, and the creatures’ intelligence showed when the others grew wise and tried to make their way around him.
Cilas and Quentin entered the hatch, finding a pair of ladders leading down into the blackness of the hold. They went down it together, followed by Helga, while Raileo started shooting cryo rounds into the climbers. Sundown barely made it in, and Raileo secured the hatch above them. Helga had to wonder if Cilas had a plan for them to get out once they were done.
Inside the crashed ship was just as wonderfully alien as the moon. Where Helga had expected a layout of tight passageways and compartments filled with equipment, what they found was the interior shell of a spacecraft.
If there was ever metal on the bulkhead it was now gone, stripped clean to the hull, and the deck was overtaken with soil that sprouted nocturnal plants and wildlife. Helga descended from the ladder onto a strategically placed mountain of rocks.
It reminded her of a cave, it was so open and different from what she had expected to find. Whoever had crashed here had spent years stripping all the metal from the bulkhead. But why? That was the question that was driving her insane, unless they had salvaged the metal to take it off the moon. But she hadn’t seen any piles of metal outside.
Helga decided that the answer would reveal itself to them eventually, and put it out of her mind as she made her way over to the men. They were standing around a hole at the center of the space, but it wasn’t just a hole; it was a shaft, outlined in metal. It was wide enough to accommodate ten bodies, and like the hatch leading in there were two ladders, allowing for multiple entry.
“I’m guessing we have to go down there,” Helga muttered, to which Cilas grunted in agreement.
“Rend, look here,” Quentin said, and they all turned to find him pointing to a wall of brown crust that was growing on the bulkhead. “Recognize this stuff?”
“Of course. That’s the confirmation I needed that this is indeed a lizard op. Damn it. Listen up, men, you have to be ready. What we’re about to see down there may be enough to have you lose your rations inside your mask, or stay sleepless for many cycles. Steel yourselves, and be strong. This is what you struggled through BLAST and the Jumper agency to prepare for. Helga and I were victims of one of these places, and it’s bound to bring up schtill we hoped to forget, eh, Hel?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, nodding, wondering if she had only imagined him calling her “Hel” in front of the other men.
“If you feel weak, just remember,” Cilas said, putting a finger in the air to indicate the space above them. “This is what they’re doing to Vestalians all over the galaxy. Before you get sick, get thyping angry, and keep your eyes open for any Vestalian prisoners. They need to learn that we aren’t to be trifled with. That we have our own, Craqtii, and we’re out to uproot every one of these stations.”
“Let’s thyping do it, then. My fingers are itchy,” Quentin said, positioning himself over one of the ladders.
Helga expected Raileo to add something clever, but the Nighthawk was uncharacteristically silent.
Cilas took the other ladder and started descending it, with Quentin across from him on the other side, followed by Raileo Lei and Sundown, while Helga perched on the lip above them, aiming down.
Once in a while, she would look up and observe the space around her. It was a massive vessel, almost as big as the Ursula, and through the night vision of her PAS’s HUD, she could see where the Geralos spores had covered every inch of the bulkhead.
The spores grew from a substance that was manufactured by the Geralos. It was a convenient way for them to take over Alliance vessels since it converted oxygen into something akin to what they breathed on their planet. Helga had inhaled it once and almost lost consciousness immediately. She remembered its scent to be incredibly foul.
Even now, the memory of it made her want to gag, and she almost lost it when she saw someth
ing wriggle from a hole to fall to the deck where it buried itself into the soil.
“Come on down,” Cilas said, and Helga complied, gripping the handles and sliding down quickly, using her rockets to slow her descent. She landed in a small room covered in spores, where three of the walls held doors that had once belonged to the disabled ship above them.
“Hold,” Cilas said, and then he placed his forefinger near the mask of his helmet. It was something he would do whenever he was stressed or in deep thought, and Helga found it curious that he was doing it in full armor. “It’s denser down here than on the surface. PAS isn’t able to use sensor waves to map out whatever this place is.”
“Denser than a ship’s hull?” Helga said, ready to argue logic against the absurdity that she was hearing.
“Maybe dense isn’t the word I’m looking for. Can any of you make out anything beyond this room?” Cilas said.
“Negative,” Quentin said. “This place is a void. My map’s interface is showing static, like something’s bugging out.”
“That’s likely what’s happening here,” Helga said, her eyes locked onto a door, nearly willing it to open so that something, anything, would happen. These breaks in the action were always the worst, knowing that at any time they could be jumped and someone could lose their life.
“Going in blind is annoying, but far from enough to prevent us from doing our job,” Cilas said. “Our locations are synced, so until we find the jammer, we can keep track of our path as we explore it. Spores mean lizards, and we know it’s likely the szilocs can burrow into here. Stay half-cocked, but smart. We are all professionals, so let’s thyping act like it.”
“Should we split up, Commander?” Raileo said, and Cilas seemed to consider it before shaking his head.
“We’re blind, and it’s likely to be a maze in here, but together we run the risk of being trapped,” he said, undecided. He made the motion of running his hand through his hair—another tell from him thinking deeply—sliding his gauntleted palm across his helmet. “Tell you what, Nighthawks, let’s see what we’re dealing with here. Line up for the breach, and Ray, pick a door and fry it so that we can take a look inside.”