by TJ Ryan
The sergeants strapped their particle RFLs across their backs, the thick barrels hanging down past their waists. Their pistols were strapped at their right thighs. Tara didn’t recognize the canisters on their belts but she suspected they were some sort of handheld explosive device. The difference between the Defensive Engineers and the military, she thought. The Engineers defended and tried to build things. The military was only interested in blowing things up.
“You really think you’ll need those?” she asked.
“Yes,” Crestin said immediately. “Yes I do.”
Then Enverly activated the airlock door. It hissed open and separated into three panels that slid away into the bulkhead walls, opening up the inner airlock chamber, a rectangular section just big enough for the four of them to stand shoulder to shoulder while the door behind them closed up again. The filtration system sucked in air from outside, pushing it into the chamber and displacing the ship’s atmosphere with the planet’s.
Tara found Tyrese’s hand, and held on tight.
Here we go, she thought to herself.
In her ear, a low keening sound began repeating itself over and over. It took a moment to recognize it as Crestin’s wheezing breath. Tara didn’t turn around to look but she could imagine the expression on his face. The man was terrified to go out there, out on the Earth. Such a big, strong man. She never would have expected something like this to scare him this badly. Maybe it was some kind of phobia or maybe he used his muscles to compensate for a coward’s personality. Either way, Tara had to wonder if Crestin would make it fifty yards out there, let alone the kilometer they had to go to get to their destination.
Then the outer airlock door was opening as well, and the landing ramp was lowering on its four hydraulic arms, and it was time to step out into a brave new world.
Tyrese was the first one to start down the ramp, but he stopped halfway to the surface. Ducked down under the belly of God’s Hammer, he stopped, and then turned back to her, holding her gloved hands in his.
“This was always supposed to be you setting your foot on the Earth first.” He led her around him, and then ahead on the narrow ramp with its integrated steps. “Come on, Engineer Royce. Show us the wonders of our home.”
She barely suppressed a giggle at the way he said that, all important and dramatic like. She took a step, and then another, and then it was her leading Tyrese, and the other two following, and at the base of the ramp she stared out at the chaotic toxic mess that had once been her home.
Enverly had nestled God’s Hammer in a valley surrounded by towering rock spires that cast long shadows through the bare light of day, all of the shadows pointing at their ship, and all of them bringing night to a world that hadn’t woken up in centuries. The only path out of their little spot of safety was the way the instruments had told them to go, into the vortex of a nearby storm, where visibility was zero and the obvious nature of the planet’s hostility couldn’t be any clearer. In a way, it made it easier for Tara to look like she knew what she was doing. On the other hand, knowing they were going into the proverbial belly of the beast gave her second thoughts about the whole entire bagging plan.
The soil under her boot wasn’t soft. It was crunchy, and hard-packed, and uneven. She tried to smooth it out with her boot but the little stones were stuck to the sludge that passed for ground, tight between sparse patches of what might have been grass. That is, if grass was ever grey, speckled with red spots that wept a thick liquid like blood. Her boots stuck to soil and grass alike making every step a chore.
The smile on her face was involuntary. She was here. This was Earth, and she was here. She was home.
Now if only she could see something green.
Turning back to look up the ramp, she nodded to Tyrese, and pulled him forward with her. He came down just as slowly as she had, staring around them at the blasted landscape that really did have a sort of weird beauty to it, taking in every detail as surely as their recorders were doing.
When he was standing beside her, she turned him to look at her so he would know her question was for him. “Did you ever think you’d be standing here?”
“Well,” he said, his voice holding the wonder and amazement she saw reflected in his eyes. “I never thought I’d be standing anywhere ever again, so this is a double surprise for me, I guess. Damn. We’re really here. This is us, standing on Earth. Thank you, Tara.”
“Me? What did I do?”
From behind her, Crestin and Enverly came down the ramp with the same wide-eyed stare she and Tyrese had. It was Enverly who answered her. “You’re the reason we’re here. If it wasn’t for you showing up here we might’ve been another two generations or more before we tried to get to the surface. You think Danvers would’ve risked his assets—namely this ship and me and Crestin here—if there weren’t something in it for him?”
“Not to mention the massive investment Overwatch has made in me with my new exotech,” Tyrese answered.
Shaking her head, Tara tried to picture the opportunistic Lieutenant Danvers doing anything that didn’t involve a benefit for himself. They were right. When the Academy gave her that mission with the probe, she had accidentally set off a series of events that had brought the four of them here. Still, it wasn’t her doing. She hadn’t foreseen any of this.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. They were here, and she had something she had to do. The fission cell hadn’t been the only thing that had been collected from the surface.
“Tyrese,” she said, swinging his hand in hers, choosing her words carefully. “Look, right now we have to go and get the tech for Danvers. After that, when we’re back in the ship, I need to tell you something. Just you and me.”
“Oooh,” Enverly mocked. “Sounds like love to me. How about you, Crestin?”
They all noticed when he didn’t answer, and turned to look at him, standing there at the edge of the ramp. His face was paler than it had been, his dark skin pasty and tight. His gaze swept past the others like he wasn’t even seeing them.
“Does anyone else feel that?” he asked. “Like a pressure all around us. Pressing down on us… it’s like there’s, um, a hand. Yeah. Uh, a hand wrapped around me, and its, um, crushing me. Damn it. Don’t you feel it?”
He reached over his shoulder for the handle of his RFL, his breathing quick and raspy in the comms, and it was only when Enverly grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm away from the weapon that he seemed to come out of whatever panic he’d slipped into. It took some doing to convince him to even step off the ramp, but Enverly did it, slow but sure.
“Maybe we should leave him here at the ship,” Tyrese suggested.
“Don’t you leave me alone!” Crestin shouted, grabbing hold of Enverly’s arm and holding tight to her. “Don’t you dare! I can’t… you don’t feel that pressure? Honest to God I think it’s going to crush me to death! We should all just get back on the ship and go. Right? I mean, I’m right, aren’t I?”
“It’s the atmospheric pressure,” Tara tried to explain to him. “It’s greater than what you’re used to on Overwatch. This soup—” She swept her hand through the air, stirring brown and gray swirls as her fingers passed through. “—it’s thicker than the air we breathe on the stations or the habitable planets of the colonies, but it won’t hurt you.”
He wasn’t listening. His eyes went off to the horizon and he froze in place. “Did you see that? Something moved. Over there.”
They looked off in the direction where he pointed. All Tara could see was shadows and the edge of a razor-sharp column of stone that was probably as long as Overwatch and tall enough that the top was lost in the murky gray light.
“There’s nothing there, Crestin.” Enverly’s voice was sharp. “Pull yourself together, Sergeant. You want to go all bagging brain melt on me wait until we’re off this rock and back on Overwatch. You hear me?”
He was nodding, but his lips trembled as he answered her. “Right. Uh, right. Back on Overwatch. Sure. Sure.”<
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“Fine. Now. Tara, lead on. Got your heading?”
Tara tapped her left ring finger to the heel of her glove’s palm, activating her heads up display on the inside of her faceplate. She checked the overlay map against the landscape, and waited for the blue line to appear, marking her path. “Got it,” she said. “This way.”
The ground pulled at their feet as they walked, and the wind howled and blew dark curtains of poisonous gas across their path, and Tara marveled at it all. There wasn’t much to hear. Just the howl and hiss of the wind, and Crestin’s constant muttering. “Overwatch. Pull it together. Get back to Overwatch.”
He was still terrified. That much was obvious, but Tara didn’t care as long as he did his job.
The blue line went around an outcropping of rock, down a gently sloping hill, and back up again. The distance meter kept going slowly down, and when she looked, she could barely see the blinking running lights of the God’s Hammer behind them.
Crestin followed her line of sight, whirling to face back the way they had come, his breathing coming in tight gasps now. His hand reached for his weapon again.
This time, Enverly wasn’t fast enough to stop him.
“Did you see it!” he shouted. “Did you see it! It’s there. It’s right there and it’s going to take the ship! We can’t let it take the ship!”
Raising the barrel of his RFL, he fired off into the gloom. A red spiral of dispersed energy cut through the dark and flames followed in its wake.
Tyrese gaped. Tara pieced it together in her mind a moment later. The atmosphere was flammable if resonated at the right frequency. It was basic science.
Apparently, the RFLs resonated at the exact frequency to ignite the very air around them.
“Crestin put it down!” Enverly ordered him. “Do not fire that weapon again!”
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Crestin was lost to whatever hallucinations had taken hold of his fevered brain. Tara tried again to see what he was seeing, without luck. There was nothing there but the twisted landscape of the Earth, and them.
And the ship.
Without warning Crestin turned the RFL around in his hands. Holding it like an axe in his hands he swung it around at Enverly as she tried to grab hold of him and talk sense into him again. The weapon caught her across the chest of her envirosuit and knocked her backward. Tara didn’t know if it hurt her or not but falling down into the sticky ground trapped her on her backside as she struggled to free herself, and gave Crestin time to do what he did next.
Tara watched as the big bull of a man took off running for the God’s Hammer. Or, at least, did the next best thing in this environment. One leg lifted up at a time, and he launched himself forward in an ungainly leap, and then the next leg lifted up, and he jumped forward, and so on, and so on, and he was covering the distance to the drop ship a lot quicker than Tara was comfortable with.
Tyrese had knelt down next to Enverly, and together they got her up to a sitting position as she tried to free her legs from the sludge. He crouched, getting his legs under him, and his hands under her arms, and when he stood up it was like watching a power loader lift a cargo container. His exotech enhanced his leg strength and Enverly was out of the sludgy mess of the unforgiving ground just like that.
“He’s going to take the ship,” Enverly cried out, saying out loud the very thing that Tara and Tyrese had been thinking to themselves. “We have to stop him!”
“There’s no way we can catch him now,” Tyrese pointed out. “Crestin? Crestin listen to me. Come back to where we are. We need you. We need you here, do you copy?”
Crestin shouted back something unintelligible, and that was all.
Then they saw the blast from his gun ignite the air around him in a fireball of purple and red. Crestin screamed, and there was silence.
Tara had been momentarily blinded by the intensity of the light. When she looked up again, Crestin wasn’t there.
In the next instant, God’s Hammer lifted itself up from the ground with long bursts of its thrusters. The front of the ship swung around wildly, and the body was canted at an angle as it pushed itself forward and then tried to climb sharply only to go into a sort of spiral as it listed left, and then right, and then—
“It’s coming right for us!” Enverly pointed out. “Run!”
Run… where, Tara thought to herself. The closest cover was the edge of a nearby rock spire. She took off in that direction, Tyrese close behind, and she totally lost track of Enverly as she threw herself down behind the leaning tower of rock just as she heard the roar of the drop ship’s engines and God’s Hammer passed overhead, crashing into the very rocks she had been counting on to save her life.
An explosion rocked the ground under her and she brought her arms up over her head, tendrils of soil pulling at her in sticky stringers, knowing that when the rocks from above came down on her head she was going to die. She would be the first human to die on Earth in one thousand years.
Talk about getting into the history books the hard way.
She laughed hysterically at that, feeling death coming for her.
Boulders the size of the room they had held her in up on Overwatch crashed down to her right and her left. Some even struck each other. None of them hit her.
In the middle of the avalanche she felt Tyrese throw his body over hers, shielding her with his own life. If she hadn’t known the first rock to land on them would kill them both, it would have been a very romantic gesture. Maybe it was, even so.
She looked up as flames flashed across the sky. The drop ship, on fire and breaking apart, spun in a slow arc of death, further and further away from them, meteoric pieces of the once magnificent craft shooting off in all directions. She saw the moment when it crashed, most of a kilometer away, and then bounced, scarring the ground and spreading oily flames everywhere.
God’s Hammer was lost to them. Crestin was dead, and their only way off the planet was gone. Death had missed her with the falling rocks only to deal her a long, slow death stranded on her race’s homeworld.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It took her several long minutes to remember to move. It took her even longer, with Tyrese’s help, to pull herself off the ground. It was unforgiving stuff, and it wanted her to stay right where she was. Maybe, she thought sourly, the planet was angry at them for burning out a wide swath of it with their drop ship.
“What are we going to do now?” Tyrese kept asking, over and over. “Tara, what in the bagging Hell are we going to do now?”
Survive, was the first answer that came to mind, but it was far too simple an answer. Survive how? Live where? What were they supposed to eat or drink or breathe, for that matter?
She tried to think back over her training lessons on the envirosuits. There was two days’ worth of breathable air contained in the suits themselves. The rest of what they needed was supposed to come from their drop ship. Recharging the suits each day from the reserve tanks on God’s Hammer would keep them alive for weeks, if needed.
Well. God’s Hammer was broken. It wouldn’t be saving their lives now.
There was a little bit of water the suits could produce, too, by recycling sweat and urine and as much as that grossed her out she’d take drinking her own filtered liquids if it meant not dying for just that much longer. It was just the three of them, after all, and that meant—
With a gasp, Tara pushed herself to her feet. “Enverly?” she said loudly into her comms. “Enverly, where are you? Can you hear me?”
Tyrese picked his way back through the field of freshly fallen boulders. “Where was she?” he asked. “Wasn’t she right with us?”
“I don’t know,” Tara had to admit. “We were all running for our lives… I can’t believe Crestin did that! He just blew up our ship. You know what that means, right?”
“That we’re going to die here?” he said, and if he was trying to be funny it didn’t work.
It was next to one of the bigger sections of brown rock
that they found a body lying in the muck. Enverly was on her back, the soil sludge actually splashed up along her sides and over her legs so that it looked like the Earth was trying to swallow her up. Tyrese bent down carefully, not wanting to put any more of his body in touch with the ground than he had to. Tara saw Enverly’s face through her faceplate. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted, but it was impossible to know if she was breathing.
They both saw something else, too. One of Enverly’s arms was actually pinned under the rock.
“Tara,” Tyrese said in a near-whisper. “We might be alone on this—”
With a sudden gasp of air Enverly’s eyes shot open and she tried to sit up, a motion that was cut short by both the mess of soil around her and the way her arm was caught. She screamed, either in terror or pain, and she kept screaming.
“Enverly. Enverly!” Tyrese yelled over the sergeant’s howling. “Listen to me. You’re fine. You’re okay. Listen to me!’
Tara didn’t know why she did it, but she reached forward and slammed her hand down flat against Enverly’s faceplate, hard and quick, and the suddenness of it brought the other woman back to herself. She stopped screaming. She took several breaths. Her eyes focused on Tyrese, and then Tara.
“Don’t,” she said, “ever do that again.”
“Then don’t scream in my ear,” Tara said, pointing to the side of her helmet where the comms speaker was embedded. “We’re in trouble here, Sergeant, and we need cool heads. I’m not going to let the same thing happen to you that happened to Crestin.”
“Crestin,” Enverly repeated, a note of panic creeping back into her voice. “Where is he?”
Tyrese heaved a sigh. “My guess? He’s in whatever Hell is reserved for people who go insane and condemn three other people to die on a lonely and forsaken planet.”
Enverly blinked at him. “He’s dead.” It wasn’t a question. She must have seen what happened to the drop ship, Tara reasoned, even if her addled brain was keeping her from remembering everything. “He blew up the drop ship. He tried to take off from the planet and he botched the ascent. Bagging hell, we’re trapped.”