by DN Farrell
He clicked his helmet into position, closed the visor and then switched on the night vision. Then counting down from three to zero, he hit the emergency door opening option, which had the Plexiglass windscreen suddenly opening up, in a one hundred and eighty degree direction, thus lifting the snake worm and throwing it out of the way. Kell jumped out of the cockpit and immediately the other snake worm had him by his leg and it was strong!
Suddenly Kell and his five hundred kilogram marine armored suit, were flung to the ground hard. It was all over him and leaking that intense acid as it went. Before Kell knew what hit him, it had its sucker on his visor and started burning it. With his right hand he reached around and using all of his biomechanical strength, he yanked it off and slapped its sucker hard against the ground. That creature must have weighted a couple of hundred kilograms, judging by how little it moved when he flung it.
The second snake worm was rapidly heading towards him, but kell blasted the first one with his side arm, taking off its sucker. Then using the blaster again, it took a chunk out of the left side of the second creature's body and it too stopped moving.
But it was not over yet, as another five or six of them were moving after him rapidly. He turned and started to run and in the process he accidentally ran straight of off the terrace, where the pod was parked. He dropped down forty feet to the ground below hard, but he managed to land upright and apart form a heavy jolt and a squeak from his body armor, he was still in one piece. He couldn't see anything out of his visor, thanks to the burning acid, which had badly damaged it, so instead he shouted out a command "Night screen". With that a small TV screen dropped down behind the visor, which gave him a very clear picture of the landscape, using a small camera imbedded in his helmet, and what he saw surprised him.
Everywhere there were those snake worms, hundreds of them and they were coming and going, into and out of the various houses and warehouses in the village of Exejet. kell now knew why there were no doors or windows. The farmers just came in the winter, when these creatures where asleep or dead, but during the summer they left the planet to those little monsters and let them run free, rather than having them destroy the doors and windows.
Kell wasn't sure what to do next, the snake worms appeared to be everywhere, but he couldn't stay here, as they were already moving towards him. Then he remembered the communications building, which had some reinforced vaults. They were made of a heavy alloy and should resist the acid of those creatures. With that he immediately started to run at high speed, towards the communications building.
As he ran, however, a large number of giant worms where parked in the laneway, which brought him towards the communications building. For a second kell was not sure what to do, then he had an idea. Taking out his laser rifle, he set up it on a wide dispersal round, which would produce a very hot thirty yard wide beam, which would act on anything in its path, just like a flame thrower. He squeezed the trigger for a few seconds and dozens of those creatures went up in flames.
Then taking his opportunity, he ran like the blazes across the burning carcasses of these creatures. He made maybe seventy feet of progress, and then he saw some more creatures. So once again he took his rifle and fired a wide dispersal shot for a few seconds, again causing them to blaze, then he reloaded his laser rifle and moved on.
The rest of the way appeared clear, but just as he went to enter the communications building, a really big snake worm, which had being sitting on the roof, maybe fifteen feet up in the air, slid off and landed with a thump on his shoulders throwing him to the ground. The creature had the same MO as all the other creatures. It quickly wrapped itself around him and seemed instinctively to know that the visor was weak or maybe it took the visor to be the eyes. Anyway once again kell had a big acidic sucker burning its way through his visor. He couldn't get at his blaster, because the creature was squeezing his right arm so tightly that he couldn't move it, even with all of his biomechanical strength.
The next few seconds felt like minutes, kell was starting to hear a sizzling sound and knew that any second now this deadly acid would be all over his face, then it would be lights out. Was this it, after nearly seventy years of service in the marines, Colonel Henry Kell, the victor of many battles and the marines most highly decorated officer, gets taken out by a gigantic worm?
But just then he remembered the electric shocker which the suit came with. He had forgotten about it until then, because he never had any recourse to use it before now, but it was worth a shot. He shouted out the command "Electro shock!", then twenty five thousand volts of electricity ran along the length of his armored suit for a full five seconds. He was fine, he was insulated inside, but the big worm was on fire!
He could hear the flesh sizzling and he tried to move his arms again and this time the creature fell into pieces. Quickly he got up and ran through the building, blaster in hand blasting here and there, whenever he saw a big worm. Then once he got to the first floor he saw a row of three large metal safes, built into the wall. Several worms where wondering aimlessly around the floor and one fairly big one was lingering along the circular staircase above him, but this time kell wasn't going to get caught out. He pointed at the creature with his blaster and blew its mid body to bits, then pointing at the other creatures, he blasted them "Pew, pew, pew." He then opened the first safe, it appeared intact, he switched on the power inside it, got in and then closed the door and locked it.
The safe looked pretty secure, its walls where several feet deep. He didn't recognise the alloy it was made from, but it looked strong enough. He sat there and waited, but there was no noise. Then he took an attachment out of his right hand chest unit and attached it to the door, this would act like a sort of scanner, which could see through the wall and receive information back, which the suits on-board computer would turn into visual imagery. Kell examined the door and several worms where working away at it. Then he tried each wall, the ceiling and the floor, but no snake worms where near there.
The minutes gave way and as he checked he saw different worms come and go. After all they hadn't got an infinite supply of acid, which they could produce. Hours passed by and Kell just kept awake, just in case, but so far so good. And so it went kells first night on the planet Exocon!
Day Three
Chapter Ten – Bandits
Eventually Kell saw the snake worms leaving via his sensors and as first light arose, he opened the safe door and looked outside. Apart from some big worm trails in the sand on the computer room floor, the snakes were all gone. Kell turned and looked at the door and it was filled with dozens of four inch to six inch wide sucker marks, where the big worms had used acid to burn the door. Only burning away a centimeter or so of metal, in a one meter thick door, that meant that the safe was Kell's new bedroom!
Feeling fatigued, kell wandered around the town and followed some of the worm trails and then on the edge of town, he found a small hill which looked much like an ant hill, only it was about five feet in height, with a one meter wide hole on top and he guessed that the worms probably slept in there. Then he walked over to his escape pod and it was perfectly intact, only the Plexiglass was damaged and it was badly damaged. Space grade Plexiglas, resistant to blaster shots and capable of the ravages of high speed space travel, more or less disintegrated by worm acid!
Kell looked at the Plexiglass, a four inch thick plate of it and all but half an inch remained intact, enough to maintain cabin pressure, which was good, as the little pod although slow had a thermonuclear engine, which could run for decades. If he could figure out how to use it in manual drive, he could always fly it of off this planet and go somewhere else. The ship could travel for years on its fuel cell, but kell could only travel for weeks on his supplies and weeks of space travel at a low speed could only get him from this planet to another nearby planet.
Kell then decided it was nap time. He checked up the database on the pod and apparently Exocon had a thirty hour day and a ten hour night, during the summer mon
ths, so he just had to insulate himself in that safe at night for ten hours and he would be ok. But also he was now pretty tired, after a sleepless night, and he had another twenty nine hours of daylight before sundown, so taking advantage of the relative safety of the safe, he used some old tarpaulin sheets, which he had found in a small factory, for bedding, and some chair cushions from the computer room, in the communications tower as a pillow.
Then taking of his armor, for the first time in several days, he found a bathroom in the communications tower and had a bath and shave, before setting his marine armor onto self-cleaning mode, which would wash away any odours or waste out of his suit, while he locked the safe door and took a four hour nap, in the air conditioned and air recycling alloy safe.
The hours drifted by and kells sleep was the deep dark sleep of absolute stress and fatigue, with only a brief dream, moments before awakening, were he was at an amusement park with his brother and his niece and everyone was really happy. Then with a start he awoke and his dream euphoria quickly left him, as he realized that he was the only man on this dreary planet and that he only had minimal food supplies, unless he wanted to start hunting and eating giant worms, which he thought to himself was always a possibility!
Kell quickly got up and jumped back into his now clean smelling suit and he took a small cube of waste products out of a small access hole, in the back of the suit, and buried them in the sand outside of the communications tower. Well from now on he could use the communications tower bathroom, that was a good thing. It then dawned on Kell, that since the computers worked he could at least take a look at how the Exugenean solar system was shaping up after the battle.
With his left hand, he ate food concentrate from his suits tube dispenser, while his trusty helmet lay on the console beside him, meanwhile with his right hand he leafed through the visuals on the Holo Screen. The solar system looked normal, accept for a lot of space junk. By the looks of it the Trigerius had indeed escaped, but he could clearly see a 3D outline of the Virgil, which had been ripped in half by the large Dreadnought. What a mess he thought and then looking at the planet Exocon itself, he scanned for any life forms or orbiting ships, nothing, but there was a ship nearby, which appeared to be heading towards Exocon.
He watched for a good fifteen minutes before the ship, a small dot on the Holo Screen, took an orbit around Exocon. Packing up for fear of getting caught with his pants down, kell quickly switched of the computers and draped the tarpualin sheet over them. He locked the vault door, put his helmet back on and took a broom from a closet and used it to cover his footprints. He then backtracked to the pod, covering his tracks as he went.
Upon reaching the pod he switched of the homing signal and switched on the defensive invisibility cloak, which made the pod invisible and then lying in the sand under the ship, his brown armor, painted brown to match the sands of Exugenes, blended in equally well with the dull orangy brown sand of Exocon.
Kell was lying there with the sensor scanner beside his left eye and his laser rifle in front of him. Fifteen minutes later the small space ship broke through the atmosphere of the planet and within minutes it had landed somewhere due east of where Kell was located. His sensor equipment was good, but it wasn't that good, as he had lost the craft about forty kilometers away, at a height of one thousand feet and then he had lost the signal, but for sure they were parked somewhere out there. It would only be a matter of time before they came here.
Not wanting to send them an invitation, as to his whereabouts, kell switched off the high end sensors, on the sensor scanner, which could easily be detected by them and he just kept the proximity alert on, which would simply go off once some movement took place, within a hundred meters of Kell, but it gave off such a weak signal that nobody would ever know that he was there.
Twenty minutes went by, half an hour went by, one hour went by and nothing. Maybe they had gone in a different direction, then again maybe not. Finally his proximity sensor went off and kell looked around, but he couldn't see anything. After a couple of minutes, he heard a soft swishing sound and then quite suddenly a small sand duner, a vehicle for travelling over sands dunes, glided into town on its anti-grav hovers.
In the small craft, where four humanoid beings. They were small, hairy and noisy and looked like little black haired panda's, with humanoid hands; they were Incenotopians, a groups of bandits and traders form the planet Incenotope. A nice enough place, but they had so called traders, who were actually bandits. They would strip a ship bear or even a planet and from what Kell knew of them, they would kill him on sight. They were into scavenging and were famous for having no care about taking other life forms and killing them. So these little hairy guys had to be avoided.
Over the next hour or so, they walked all over the town and then finally concluding that there was nothing of any real value to them, save the computer equipment, which they happily pulled out of the communications tower and of course the satellite dish, they left them in a big pile in the middle of the town and then headed in a northerly direction, as they checked out their sensor equipment. It looked like they were heading towards the other pod and the marines, but Kell had made a gravestone which could lead them back to him. He slapped his head at the thought of his sentimental foolishness at marking the man’s grave in the first place, then quickly he jumped up and started running over the sand dunes, as fast as he could.
Fortunately he could run at eighty kilometers per hour, even over the sand dunes, whereas the little hover buggy, could only travel at maybe fifty kilometers per hour. Rapidly he made it to the other pod, but he needn't have worried about the grave as it had been duly robbed by the giant worms and Samuels was gone, accept for a few little nibbles, which had being forgotten by the busy worms. His ship was intact, but bits of him and his armor were strewn here or there. Kell Looked down and seen that the visor was good on Samuels helmet, he quickly switched visors and then buried himself in the sand about a hundred feet from the pod.
Within a few minutes, the sand dune vehicle, with its five Incenotopian crew members, arrived on the scene and over the course of the next few minutes, they would rip out anything which had not been nailed down in the pod. They also rummaged through the remains of Samuels, taking his blaster rifle and anything else they deemed of value. Kell could not understand their dialect, as they were speaking in a local dialect, which made for a warbling kind of sound. By nature they seemed to have very expressive bodily movements and noisy conversations, but when they saw the torn apart body of Samuels, it seemed to stir some surprise in them. Obviously they had never been on the planet Exocon before, Kell concluded, and then they all jumped into their vehicle and were off again and Kell knew where they would go.
Once they had covered a few hundred yards, kell started a fast jog behind them, feeling pretty sure that if they looked back, that they wouldn't notice a tan brown marine suit running across an orangy brown planetary surface. A few minutes later they stopped at the wreck of the Landing craft, busily looking for salvageable items. As Kell came closer, he slowed down his pace and finally he came to a stage, whereby he got down on his belly and started crawling towards the Incenotopian bandits.
Once Kell was about one hundred yards away from them, he saw his opportunity, as all the bandits where busy taking apart whatever remained of the Landing craft, which was now filled with the scattered body parts of the crew, who the giant worms had obviously eaten the night before.
Kell took of his helmet and reaching inside, he pulled out its homing signal chip, which was planted into all marine helmets, to help with the location of the marines, if perchance they end up getting lost or left behind. Kell then took out his laser rifle and placed the homing beacon chip onto a sling like structure, which was attached to the bottom part of his rifle. This structure was designed to fire projectiles, such as homing beacons and even hand grenades, if need be.
Kell wanted to place the beacon on the back of their dune buggy, but one of the bandits was happily sitting
in the driver's seat. Kell waited patiently for another couple of minutes, then one of the bandits signalled the driver to come and help them move a large sheet of Induranium shielding, which they had been able to take of off the side of the ship. Kell then lined up his sights and the projectile launcher made an almost inaudible "shhhuu" sound as it launched the beacon, a second or so later a soft thud sound was heard, as the beacon, which kell had wrapped in a special adhesive, which he carried in his suits tool box, hit home. Some of the bandits heard it and looked around for a second, meanwhile kell kept his head low in the sand. Then they ignored it and went back to their business.
Kell put his helmet back on and waited quietly for another twenty minutes or so, while the Incenotopians finished their work and then they were on their way heading back towards the town of Exejet. Kell lay in the sand for another few minutes to be on the safe side, before he started a gentle jog back towards the town.
As suspected, by the time he had reached the town, the Incenotopians had picked up the pieces of the communications center, which they had dismantled and left in a heap in the town square. Kell walked over to the pod, which was a little difficult to find, as it was invisible, but eventually while moving slowly across the terrace, with his hands out in front of him, he bumped into it with a soft thud. Reaching in and deactivating the invisibility cloak, he sat inside the pod and initiated the homing beacon, and then spent another half an hour watching the dune buggy slowly make its way across the desert, until it finally stopped at one spot, twenty six kilometers east of the town of Exejet.