The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  “Coming up on the surface intake grill now, Chip,” he reported.

  “Yep, right behind you, Cap,” Chip replied.

  “I’m gonna have a look outside with my fibre optic probe,” said Motor.

  He slowly poked the fibre out through a gap in the sturdy metal grill. The intake was off the ground and flush with the building wall that it was housed in. There was nothing below, nothing to the right. Straight ahead, towards the edge of the base and the forest, was also clear of enemies. Motor manipulated the fibre to look left. There, only ten metres away, near the wall on the other side of the tunnel opening, was an armoured fighting vehicle; the only alien asset-type that seemed to be able to detect them consistently. The twin barrels of its turret were trained precisely on the grill cover that Motor’s fibre was looking through. A chill ran down Motor’s spine as he realised that the aliens might be their match in tactical awareness. Just the thought of an independently-evolved intelligence in the same league as humanity’s was a strange, unsettling concept to him. The bitterness towards the aliens after Fuzzy’s and Crier’s demise now combined with his competitive will to survive and win.

  “Have a look at the feed, Chip,” said Motor.

  “I am,” he replied.

  “We can’t remove that grill without it seeing us—it’ll just open fire and get us like Crier and Fuzz. We’re running out of time. Any ideas?” appealed Motor, feeling tired and experiencing a mental block.

  “Yeah, I do have an idea,” said Chip. “That grill’s pretty damned solid-looking. I was thinking that we could lay down a bit further down the pipe, build up some speed using our arm and leg thrusters and launch ourselves out so fast that the aliens won’t get a bead on us. But that’s a pretty damned heavy grill. Even with our helmets on we’d risk doing some serious damage if it’s secured well. So...”

  Motor cut in, finishing Chip’s sentence for him, “...so you want to weaken it first with your shoulder pod laser in cut-mode!”

  “Exactly! Thanks for stealing my thunder, Cap! Anyway it’s you who can do the cutting—you’re closer,” he said.

  Motor targeted the laser on his shoulder pod and started cutting the first bar of the grill. If the alien AFV had infrared then the heat of the cut would light up the grill like a spotlight. But what was the worst that could happen? The AFV would open fire on the grill, which would destroy it for sure. He was far enough back to be covered and the AFV would have to stop firing sooner or later. He could have just pushed the grill out, but that would be even more likely to precipitate plasma fire on the opening, possibly blocking the route out. He continued cutting right through alternate bars at the top, then the remaining bars at the bottom. The force taken to hinge the bars outwards when he flew through was far less than it would have been before one end had been cut. It would hopefully allow them to come out unscathed and so fast the AFV wouldn’t have a chance to get a bead on them. The AFV had not responded so far, as Motor crawled back down the pipe halfway to where Chip was already positioned.

  “Okay, Chip, only eight minutes until the blast. Make your way to rally point Aberdeen on your map. Get up as much speed as you can and behind cover ASAP. I’ll most likely be drawing his fire, but who knows what else they’ve got out there? They don’t know how many of us are left so hopefully you’ll take him by surprise. Good luck, mate.”

  “Good luck, Motor,” said Chip with a lump in his throat, knowing that he may be the lone survivor within the next few seconds.

  Motor lay down and immediately powered up his arm and leg thrusters to full power accelerating him up the vent pipe like a bullet leaving a barrel. He tucked in his head, kept his hands close to his body and legs together as he felt the illusion of being freed of Gaia’s gravity. He braced himself for impact and a second later powered through the weakened grill and into the night air. He saw the brilliant white flashes of the plasma cannon illuminating the ground below as he continued to rise at a shallow angle. His conscious tactical mind kicked in and he alternated the vectors of his arm thrusters manually. He still kept his arms controlled by his side, his body aerodynamic and sleek. It had the desired effect as his erratic flight path evaded the alien plasma stream as the enemy tracked him sonically.

  Chip didn’t waste time and followed Motor towards the forest taking a slightly different path. Two streams of plasma converged on him coming perilously close as he continued to jink and weave his flight path, invisible to the eye but seemingly not to the additional enemies tracking him.

  Motor felt a wave of relief as he passed over the rows of spikes and rose faster than any terrestrial bird over the enormous boundary wall bordering the forest and dived down to the other side and cover. The plasma fire had stopped as he’d neared the wall and for the first time he felt a modicum of security return. Three minutes until detonation and he needed to put as much distance between himself and the blast as he could manage then get to rally point Aberdeen. He opted to stay on thrusters and weave a path through the giant tree trunks that now stretched as far as he could perceive. If the vicious bat-like creatures came calling he could deal with them. He knew that without the FTL gate he’d need to get used to the forest for the foreseeable future and put his evasion training to the biggest test imaginable.

  A third torrent of plasma fire joined the hunt for Chip as he tried to escape the nuclear fire about to engulf the base. He dropped low and tracked the ground as closely as he dared with literally no room for error. It would make it a lot harder for the aliens’ sonic detection method to work accurately. He knew if he hit the deck at this speed – plasma fire or not – he would break his neck. The tactic seemed to work with the three plasma streams tracking him less accurately now. Only one AFV continued to fire half-heartedly as he neared the spikes and the wall. He needed to turn sharply left as he climbed to avoid colliding with them. Even now, climbing upwards towards the wall’s peak, the plasma fire had stopped. Perhaps they didn’t want to destroy their own perimeter wall, thought Chip as he plunged down into the forest and considered Motor and the rendezvous point. Ninety seconds until detonation.

  Chip’s timer started counting down the seconds as he sped between the towering tree trunks, concentrating on avoidance. His thruster power wouldn’t last forever as he started to feel his speed drop off. He knew that the twenty kiloton nuclear device would need to be buried at least three hundred metres below ground to fully contain the blast. Underground nuclear tests in the mid-twentieth century had provided a lot of data on the effects and he knew that this bomb had been under-buried. There would be a breach to surface, high pressure gas release and ejecta thrown high into the Gaian sky. Nothing on the base should survive, but the blast would be detectable seismically and from space. Chip had no doubt that the rest of the alien military would descend on the area in force. His principal hope was that word of their escape had not yet made it outside the base.

  Motor saw his thruster power was running low and he wanted to take cover before the blast. Twenty seconds until detonation. He made a controlled landing, running along like a parachutist, but stumbling and crashing into a thankfully rubbery giant fungus. He scrambled behind the trunk of the nearest tree, sweating and relieved he’d made it, but feeling the first pangs of survivor’s guilt at leaving his fallen brothers behind. In the next few seconds, their remains would be consumed in nuclear fire along with the rest of the base. His only immediate wish was that all traces of the FTL technology would be wiped out too. Five, four, three, two, one...

  The man-made star burst into life releasing eighty-four terajoules of energy in an instant. Microseconds after that, all matter around the exploding fusion device was vaporised with a temperature of several million degrees, the bubble of vapour expanding unimaginably fast with the pressure of millions of atmospheres. Further out, the surrounding base and rock was melted. Further away still, the lithology was smashed to pieces by the shock wave as the growing bubble of superheated vapour continued to push against the flimsy overburden of rock and
alien buildings. The surface breached, allowing a jet of superheated gas and ejecta to rise high, creating a new glow in the night sky, visible for dozens of miles around. The first seismic waves reached Motor’s position and he felt the ground rumble as tectonic forces of long seized-up faults were released along with the shock waves from the bomb. He saw a huge flight of bats fleeing the epicentre in search of safety. Even the giant trees shook with the ground movement, unable to resist one of nature’s most powerful forces, harnessed by the invading humans.

  As the plume rose into the atmosphere the pressure in the blast cavity relented. The ground slumped into a circular bowl, its integrity torn apart by the forces unleashed beneath. There was nothing left of the base and the few aliens that survived were in no state to mount a hunting expedition.

  Motor sat back, thinking. He wasn’t even sure they’d met their mission objectives. And what price had been paid? He’d lost two good men, possibly Chip too. They’d killed countless aliens, polluted their planet with radioactive fallout and could have triggered the War of the Worlds. Direct action missions were the dirty work of policy and very few people knew the truth. Once they did, all hell would break loose on Earth. He was in no position to tell anybody anything even if he’d wanted to. Survival was his new mission; escape and evade his mantra. Survival on an alien planet with only the clothes on his back and the supplies in his backpack. He had a rendezvous to make at rally point Aberdeen. He feared that the next appointment in his diary after that would be much, much later.

  Chapter Eighteen

  October 16, 2061 Special Space Service HQ, Hereford, UK

  Major-General James Hadley entered the operations room early, after a restless night’s sleep.

  “Sergeant, anything to report?” he asked Sergeant Amy Mason who’d been monitoring her display for word from the patrol. She’d been assigned from GCHQ and was one of the first Brits to be trained up in the operation of the Entangled Quantum Particle transceiver, which could communicate at low bit rate instantly, regardless of distance. The EQP transceiver box was connected to the SSS network and would send the expected check-in pings and text messages to her display as and when they arrived. The counterpart transceiver was sent with the Operation Rapid Denial squad on its mission to destroy the Santa Maria probe on planet Gaia.

  “Nothing, sir, not a single report and not a single ping,” she said.

  “Even after you initiated a request-for-response from your side?” he asked, taking a seat next to Sergeant Mason, both of them looking towards the display.

  “Even after multiple and repeated attempts, sir,” she replied, turning to face her superior. ”The transceiver they’re carrying should ping us every hour with the time and its coordinates. We can request a ping at any time over and above that. The last ping we got was forty hours ago.”

  “That was the one from low-level orbit around Gaia, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s correct, sir.”

  There was also no report of A-Patrol members transiting back to the Alliance Citadel environs either, indicating that their portable FTL gate was also out of play.

  “So let’s run through the possibilities again,” said Hadley, as some of the other members of the ops team in the room started looking up from their screens, listening in on the conversation.

  “Well, sir,” started Sergeant Mason, her eyes directed up as she accessed her brain for the answers, “it’s either malfunctioning or destroyed—there can be no other explanation.”

  “Could it have been switched off either deliberately or by mistake? Not that I think there’s a reason for that. I just want to be comprehensive in reviewing the possibilities.”

  “No, sir. A switch-off event would have been reported through to us here. Also highly relevant, sir, is that there was no report of malfunction either, so if that is the explanation it was a fast-acting, catastrophic malfunction. The device is complex, but there is plenty of redundancy built in. If a component failed then we’d get an event report automatically sent and the backup system inside the transceiver would take over.”

  “And there was no such report, eh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that the transceiver, at least, has been catastrophically damaged or destroyed. Is that right?”

  “That would be a reasonable conclusion, sir, yes.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. This, and the fact that nothing or no one has jumped back through the portable FTL gate, does not bode well for the mission, I’m afraid. We’ve come to the stage where we need to start talking about search and rescue plans.”

  ***

  “So let me summarise,” said General Fred McIver over the video conference to the British Special Forces commander, Hadley, “Operation Far Light’s primary objective is to find and recover the four SSS patrol members. Supplementary objective is to embed the two-man team on the Gaian surface to gather intel on the aliens for as long as possible with a view to establishing a permanent presence on the planet. A constellation of adapted microprobes will be sent to Gaian orbit to facilitate the intel mission.”

  The two men and their colleagues had just spent the last two hours going over mission details and were ready to authorise Operation Far Light. It consisted of sending a two-man SSS patrol – B-Patrol – by modified Viper drone to Avendano. There were only two Vipers left with the cloaking field generator and manpod modifications. One was being kept in reserve and more were being prepared in case they were required later. The two-man team would be equipped with another EQP transceiver and FTL gate to get home as was planned in Operation Rapid Denial. The patrol would reconnoitre the alien base and its locale from orbit, and then, all going well, enter Gaia and do a UHALO jump to the vicinity of A-Patrol’s landing zone. On the ground, they’d then look out for scheduled microbursts or other signs of A-Patrol.

  “Concur with your summary, sir, and just to highlight again that the supplementary mission is only nominally secondary to the search and rescue brief. All sentiment aside, alien intel is the one thing we sorely lack and will help decision-making no end if, for some reason, Buick’s team failed in destroying Santa Maria and denying the aliens our FTL technology. Any final questions from around both rooms?” asked Hadley.

  “What do you think happened, sir?” asked a young lieutenant sitting in the room in Hereford with Hadley.

  “The answer is that we simply have no way of knowing, Lieutenant. However, with both the EQP transceiver and the FTL gate out of play it doesn’t look good. We knew the chances of failure were high as there were so many unknowns and firsts. Lack of intel of the alien environment, their tech and their modus operandi meant that Buick and his men were up against it. But on the other hand they were the best of the best, so we’ve got to proceed as if they’re alive and evading the enemy,” said Hadley in a uniformly sombre tone, incongruous with his closing remark. His were eyes downcast, thinking of the men he knew so well.

  Operation Far Light was approved a short time later. The next human foray into hostile alien space was about to begin.

  ***

  Captain Jennifer Martin was the first female Special Space Service patrol leader in its history and more than a match for her male counterparts in every way. Jen was not only a captain in the service but was captain of the divisional ladies’ soccer team. She’d never married and never settled down—she was married to the service and the life and wouldn’t have had it any other way. Some might have said she was institutionalised; if that was the label people wanted to apply to her that was fine with Jen. Her short, dark hair and tanned skin spoke of her Mediterranean heritage, her mother and father emigrating from France before her birth. She checked her battlesuit diagnostics for the last time and settled back in the recumbent manpod seat waiting to be pushed into the strange, dark sphere the FTL gate had just started generating. She turned to her sergeant and saw he was engaged in checking his own systems.

  Sergeant Jonah Fitzroy sat next to Jen, trying to focus on his contac
t lens display, while pushing away recurring thoughts of his last time with Hailey and her two little children. She’d split up with the father when the youngest was still a baby. Jonah had become more of a father figure to them than their biological dad and he loved them as his own. A sensitive man with a deep sense of fairness and justice, Jonah was, nevertheless, a trained soldier and deadly whether armed or not. He was tall, athletic and handsome with a dazzling smile that the ladies used to go for while he was still on the market.