The Planetsider Trilogy

by G J Ogden

  “What do those things do?” asked Summer, after the roar of the engines had softened to an echo, reverberating through the air like distant thunder.

  Ethan looked at the grenades and realized he had already forgotten everything Page had told him about their operation. He carefully placed them into the pouches attached to his weapons belt.

  “I hope we never need to find out.”

  Chapter 28

  The dull thud of flesh hitting metal focused Ethan’s attention away from the wispy vapor trail – the only remaining evidence of the shuttle’s departure – back to the door that Page had sealed shut. Summer drew the knife that Ethan had given to her from its scabbard, flipped it over and held the handle out towards Ethan.

  “You might need this.”

  Ethan took the weapon and gripped it tightly, while Summer unslung her bow. Reaching back into the quiver she was suddenly acutely aware of how few arrows she had left, but she drew one and nocked it in readiness.

  Ethan turned to Yuna and was about to ask her to cover the door, but noticed she was unarmed.

  “Yuna, where’s your bolt-thrower?”

  The question sparked a momentary panic as Yuna checked herself automatically, as if the absence of such a massive and heavy weapon was not obvious enough.

  “I left it in lab!” Yuna cried, finally realizing what had happened. “The power failed, and everything happened so fast, I forgot to pick it up. I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t worry,” Ethan shouted, as more fists pounded against the door, but he wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince. “We need to get off this roof. If they break through the door, a knife and a bow won’t do us much good!”

  “There!” said Yuna, pointing towards a small domed section of the otherwise flat roof, on the far side of the long, rectangular building, closer to where they had first entered. “That should be the facilities section, where the main power generator and other utilities are housed.”

  “But what if they’ve already got inside there?” said Ethan, as the pounding grew more furious and the door began to bow outwards.

  “It would be a restricted area; cordoned off from the main lab. No windows and hardened walls and doors.”

  A corner of the door split open and a hand slid through, slicing flesh against the jagged edge of the torn metal.

  “We don’t have a choice, go!” shouted Summer. “Ethan and I will cover you, but hurry.” Summer enjoyed a fight, but there were limits, even for her.

  Yuna, Gaia and the hermit sprinted for the dome, while Ethan and Summer walked backwards towards it as fast as they could manage, while still keeping watch on the buckling door.

  “Ethan, you should go too; by the time they get close enough for you to use that blade, it will be too late, anyway.”

  “I’m not leaving you to face them alone,” Ethan replied doggedly.

  “I didn’t say leave me!” Summer shouted. “You hold the damned door open and wait till I get inside.”

  The top quarter of the metal door had broken away from the frame and Ethan could see more hands grasping and pulling at the metal, and more bodies hammering against it, trying to break it down through sheer force of will and the power of flesh and bone.

  “You’d better be there, or I’ll come back out here after you!” Ethan shouted, and then he gritted his teeth and ran hard for the dome.

  The door creaked and groaned against the growing strain and then seconds later it collapsed and clattered across the coarse, black mineral coating on the roof. The first of the roamers charged through, fighting and struggling with one another to squeeze through the opening, giving Summer precious seconds to attack. She carefully aimed the first arrow low, sinking it into the closest roamer’s knee and causing it to fall and trip up the others who had followed its frenzied charge. Summer backpedaled and shot again, using the same tactic to create a barricade of roamer bodies, before turning and sprinting towards the dome to put some distance between her and the advancing horde. Ethan was almost at the door to the dome, but she could also see that Yuna had yet to get it open; she had to buy more time.

  Summer stopped and turned suddenly, sliding back across the surface like an ice dancer and loosing a third arrow into the eye of the closest enemy. She fired again and again, landing arrows to the groin and face of the next nearest attackers, but there were at least a dozen more racing onto the rooftop behind them. She reached behind for another arrow but grasped only air. She was out.

  “Damn it!” she cried out and then turned and sprinted again, faster and harder than she had ever run in her life, legs and lungs burning from the intense effort. Ahead of her, Yuna had finally managed to unlock the door and she and the others were piling inside; all except Ethan who waited, knife in hand. He was shouting, but she was unable to make out his words before a hard thump to the middle of her back sent her tumbling head over feet across the coarse surface of the roof, stripping skin from her arms and knees like sandpaper, until her body slammed against the dome and came to a sudden, painful stop. Dazed and disorientated, she pushed herself up as a roamer leveled a charge at her. Her bow had spiraled far out of reach and so instead she held up her hands to brace against the impact, but before the roamer could reach her, Ethan tackled it, simultaneously driving his knife into its gut and deflecting it away from Summer. The roamer careened away like a loose rock bouncing down the side of a hill, but Ethan also landed heavily, striking his head on the coarse, moss-covered surface.

  More roamers were flooding onto the roof, like bats escaping from a cave, and the sight of them was enough to fill even Summer’s heart with terror. She grabbed Ethan’s arm and hauled him to his feet, then dragged them both unsteadily towards the door leading down through the dome, but a meter from the entrance she wavered and fell. Summer screamed in pain and frustration, and then felt hands grip her arms; she steeled herself, expecting the bite of sharp nails and the hammering of fists against her flesh to follow, but instead the hands pulled her and Ethan in through the door, which was then slammed shut and bolted. Seconds later the hollow thump of flesh on metal could be heard on the outside, but this time the thumps were muted due to the greater thickness of the latest barrier to separate them from their adversaries.

  Ethan sat up and groaned, rubbing his head. He checked himself automatically as if missing something, and then hammered a clenched fist on the deck. “Damn it!”

  Summer jumped to her knees, her head on a swivel, scouting for signs of danger. “What!? What’s wrong.”

  “My knife!” said Ethan, despondently. “I left my favorite knife inside the gut of that damned roamer.”

  Summer felt like walloping Ethan on the nose. “Seriously!”

  Ethan dusted himself down and stood up; Yuna was a few steps further down from the landing, having apparently been the one to drag them inside, and was watching him with the same glazed looked of astonishment as Summer.

  “What? It was a good knife…”

  “You can go back out there and get it, if you like,” said Yuna, sarcastically.

  Ethan listened to the incessant hammering, feeling the reverberations rattle the metal plating on the landing. “No, on second thoughts, I think I’ll just leave it…”

  Ethan helped Summer up and noticed the blood stains on her elbows and knees, and although it was naturally camouflaged by her vivid red hair, he could also feel blood matted into the hair around the back of her head.

  “We should have Gaia see to your wounds, once we find somewhere safe,” said Ethan, inspecting the injuries carefully. “And have her check you over in general to make sure…” he hesitated, painfully aware of his own awkwardness; he could fight the maddened one-to-one, but he couldn’t talk to Summer about the things that mattered without sounding like a fool. “…I mean, to check that everything is okay.”

  Summer drew Ethan’s hands away from her and held them to stop him fussing. She could see he was struggling, perhaps even more than she was, ironically. At least she had some certainty
about her future, unlike Ethan or the others, and in some strange way the inevitability of her death was comforting. She did not fear death; it hadn’t been long since she had even wished for it, believing death to be a just punishment for her arrogance and its tragic consequences. But then she remembered the baby and what Ethan had said to her back in Forest Gate, and how it had rekindled a fire to live, or at least survive for as long as she could. It was for this reason, and no other, that she fought on.

  “I’ll let Gaia check me over,” said Summer. “She should check you over too,” she added, noticing that blood was trickling from Ethan’s head too. “But first, let’s find out if this place is safe or not.”

  Ethan nodded and let Summer’s hands slip from his, before following her and Yuna down the steep, metal staircase. At the bottom the hermit and Gaia were waiting, and met him with welcoming smiles.

  “I used to think those abominations were the craziest and scariest things on this planet,” the hermit chuckled, “but you two lunatics might just edge it!”

  “If you think that was scary, you should see her breaking in the new ranger recruits,” said Ethan, smirking, until a sharp jab to the shoulder from Summer wiped the smile from his face.

  The route ahead was blocked by another interior door, far less substantial than the exterior door that was barring the roamers from entering. Yuna had already powered up the lock mechanism using her rudimentary PVSM device. In contrast to the minimalist, clean layout of the laboratory space, their new location was more industrial and stripped-back, similar to the lower levels of the engineering complex inside the mountain. He made this observation to Yuna.

  “Yes, this laboratory facility was also operated by the UEC,” Yuna answered as she worked.

  “For a mining company, they certainly seemed to be involved in a lot more than mining,” said Ethan.

  “Greed, lad,” said the hermit. “They wanted it all and it ended up costing them everything, and us more.”

  The panel around the door turned green and the locks clicked open.

  “Got it!” Yuna cried and then she yanked open the door, causing stale, malodorous air to flow into their mouths and lungs from the space beyond; a taste that carried with it a dark sense of malaise.

  “I know that smell,” said the hermit, darkly. “Best prepare yourselves; what lies inside likely has not been disturbed since the time of the Fall.”

  Ethan suddenly had the feeling that going back outside to face the roamers might actually be preferable to entering this new room.

  “There’s no power,” said Yuna, “but the breakers for the backups should be just inside the door, assuming they weren’t depleted.” She slipped over the threshold and removed a metal panel from the wall, uncovering a series of blank, lifeless screens and a cluster of physical switches. She studied these for a few moments and then flipped several of the dust-covered switches in sequence.

  “The main backup generator is depleted, but it looks like the battery backups are still intact,” Yuna went on as she wrestled with a heavy-looking lever, before managing to pull it down. The mechanical clunk of the lever was accompanied by a physical jolt that Ethan felt through the deck plating under his feet. A second later, lights began to flick on above and around them, and the screens inside the panel lit up and began to display the status of the power systems.

  “That’s odd,” Yuna said while reading some of the information on the panels. “The main power core turned off because it ran dry of fuel.”

  “Why is that odd?” asked Ethan.

  “Well, for starters it would take months for that to happen, but once it had run out of fuel, I don’t understand why they’d then not activate the backup batteries.”

  Summer had gone ahead and was standing at the end of the corridor leading into the main room. “I think I know why… You should take a look at this.”

  Ethan felt a sense of dread as he moved towards Summer and stepped into the open space. His instincts were confirmed as he was confronted with three rotted corpses, sprawled on the deck in different locations in the room.

  “This doesn’t bode well for our chances of survival,” said Ethan. Though he had intended it as a factual statement, he was aware that it sounded darkly humorous when spoken out loud and the corners of his mouth curled slightly.

  Gaia moved past Ethan and removed her backpack, placing it on the floor beside the closest of the three bodies. She took out her medical satchel and removed a device that he’d seen her use before; it was roughly equivalent to a PVSM, but more specialized for medical analysis. Utterly unfazed by the almost entirely rotten-away corpse, she began to take samples and analyze them.

  “There are supplies here,” said Yuna, who had left the console and begun scouting the cabinets and racks along the opposite side of the room. “There are some basic dehydrated food packs, bottles of water and simple medical supplies. A couple of hand guns too. Not much to survive on, though.”

  “But if the supplies are still here, unused, then why are they dead?” asked Summer, crouching down to get a closer look at the second of the decomposed bodies, poking at it with the tip of her boot. “Wait, this one has a hole in its skull, like it was shot with something.”

  Gaia lifted her gaze from the analysis showing on her medical scanner and then shuffled with interest over to Summer’s side to inspect the second body.

  “Curious…” she began, using a spatula-like tool from her medical satchel to poke inside the hole in the corpse’s skull, which made Summer scrunch up her face in disgust. “I would say that this woman was not shot, but rather killed by a blunt-force blow to the head.”

  Ethan felt a shiver run down his spine. “But if they’d barricaded themselves in here then that would mean one of the others did that to her?”

  “So it would seem…”

  “I think I have the answer,” said the hermit from the other side of the room. He was standing over the third corpse, but examining the wall, tracing his finger along what seemed to be grooves scratched into the metal paneling. “This one had turned before it died. It was trying to claw its way out, by the look of it.”

  The others all slowly approached the hermit and looked down at the corpse, which had collapsed on its front, bony fingers still prized against the silvery-gray metal walls. In most respects it looked like the other two dead bodies, except its skull was narrower and its jaw elongated; the tell-tale signs of the Maddening. Ethan leaned in to get a closer look, fueled by a morbid curiosity to understand more about what had happened in the room all those years earlier. The flesh appeared less decomposed than the others and still clung to the bone like old leather, but instead of a rich tan color, it was course and gray and seemed to shimmer slightly under the harsh strip lights.

  “This poor sod turned and killed the others,” said the hermit, almost sounding sorry for the creature. “Then it spent who knows how long trying to claw its way out.”

  “I believe our friend is correct,” said Gaia, who was crouched by the side of the corpse. “Both of the others had bones crushed and broken before they died, and based on the level of decomposition, accounting for the conditions in this room, they died at around the time of the Fall.”

  “At least we have power, and some supplies,” said Yuna, trying to lighten the midnight-black mood in the room. “We can stay here for several days if needed, maybe longer; enough time to figure out what to do next.”

  Suddenly, Summer seemed to buckle slightly at the knees, and had to catch herself by grabbing hold of a storage rack to her side. “Ethan…” she called out weakly, and Ethan caught her as her balance wavered again. Summer’s sudden loss of strength was worrying enough, but what scared Ethan more was that she also sounded afraid.

  “Summer, what’s wrong?”

  “I… don’t…”

  Then Summer’s entire weight collapsed onto Ethan without warning, and he struggled to hold her up. The hermit and Yuna moved quickly to help him and together they laid her down gently on the f
loor. Gaia ran to fetch her medical satchel and hurriedly attached the medical scanner to Summer’s left arm, leaving it to perform its analysis while she rapidly examined Summer, checking her eyes and pulse and breathing for anything abnormal.

  “Gaia, talk to me…” said Ethan.

  Gaia didn’t answer, and returned her attention to the medical scanner, flicking through each screen and assimilating the data. Her eyes rose quickly to meet Ethan’s anxious stare; her deeply furrowed brow and the tight lines circling her eyes confirmed his worst fears before Gaia had said a word.

  “We’re losing her. We’re losing them both.”

  Ethan felt lightheaded and had to plant both hands on the floor to steady himself. His heart thudded in his chest, faster and harder with each passing second, but despite the primal reaction of his body, his mind was clear. He had considered the near inevitability of this moment ever since learning of Summer’s condition. He had respected Summer’s choice not to take Gaia’s serum, and understood her reasons why, but now the situation had changed. The serum would give her a slim chance of survival, which was infinitely preferable to what was now a clear certainty that both her and the baby would die.

  “Give her the serum.”

  “Ethan, there are still no guarantees…” Gaia began, but Ethan was resolute.

  “If she’s dead without it then what do we have to lose?”

  Gaia held Ethan’s eyes for a second and returned to her satchel, removing an injector and one of the two remaining metal canisters of serum. She opened the canister, filled the injector with a dose of the serum and then pressed it to Summer’s neck; it hissed, emptying the highly experimental formula into her bloodstream. Gaia pulled the injector away, and replaced the phial inside the metal canister.