by TJ Ryan
“Yes,” Tara agreed. “Unless we work together. Let’s get you out of here first. How’s the arm?”
Staring at Tara like she didn’t understand the question, Enverly slowly rolled her head to the side and saw her predicament. She gasped, tugging at her arm, realizing she was stuck fast. Her rose skin flushed a deeper pink. “Uh, I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt, but I can’t move. What is this ground made of, anyway?”
“God alone knows,” Tyrese said, working to free her other arm, and then her shoulder.
“I doubt God gets down here much,” Tara said. “Listen, Sergeant, we have to get you out of the soil first, and then we’ll see what we have to do to get your arm out. Okay?”
“Yes,” Enverly said in a small voice. “But… call me Atria. Okay? That’s my first name and I don’t think my rank is going to have a lot of meaning down here in the dirt.”
“Okay, Atria. Just hold still. If your arm isn’t broken we’re going to get moving as soon as we get you up.” Tara flicked her right pinky, extending the small cutting blade tool worked into the glove there. “I don’t know when sunset is in this hemisphere, but if it’s this dark during the daylight I doubt we’ll be able to take two steps at night.”
Tyrese looked up at her as he flicked out his own glove knife. “You got a plan, Tara?”
“Maybe…” She wasn’t used to being the one in charge of things, but here she was, and it looked like her idea was the only idea. “Overwatch can’t monitor us down here because of the dust clouds. So they won’t know that the drop ship got, er, blown up. They will know that we aren’t reporting back. So I figure Danvers is eager enough to get his hands on this tech that he’ll send down either another squad, or a probe. Either way, we’ll be able to get off this planet. So we just have to keep ourselves alive until that happens.”
“In a probe?” Atria Enverly asked, sucking in her breath as they pulled and prodded her out of the ground. “You want us to escape in a probe?”
“Well, maybe not in a probe,” Tara had to admit, “but if a probe lands on the surface we can at least send a message back with it in the cargo compartment—”
She stopped, very suddenly remembering the thing that she had found in the cargo compartment of that first probe that had started all of this. Besides the power cell, there had been one other thing. One precious, impossible thing that she had kept safe from the prying eyes of Overwatch and brought down with her again on this mission.
A seed. A plant seed, which proved beyond doubt that life was possible on Earth.
She’d left the seed with her equipment on the God’s Hammer. It was ash now.
“Bagging Hell,” she swore. That could have been the proof she needed to bring the Academy brass here. They could have taken control from Overwatch, and made sure Earth was for everyone, not just the military.
Then again, it had been the Academy that had her send the probe down to retrieve the fission power cell in the first place, so would they really be any better than Overwatch? Weren’t they just two sides of the same coin, anyway?
Besides, she told herself, relaxing a little, there were trees here, of a sort. There was grass here, or something close to it. Weeping puss or blood or whatever, sure, but real grass. Real trees. Maybe she could find another seed to take back with her. If she could just find someone with authority that she trusted…
With a loud sucking sound, most of Atria’s body came free and she was sitting up again, or at least leaning over, her arm still under the rock. “I think…”
Then she pulled slowly, and her arm slid free.
Good, Tara thought, it’s not broken. They might just survive this after all.
Atria screamed again, and Tyrese was grabbing for her arm, clamping his gloves down tight on a long rip in the fabric of the envirosuit. It had saved her arm from being busted, but it had taken a hard cut that had torn the fabric open, exposing Atria to the atmosphere. Tara could see the whoosh of oxygen-rich air escaping through the hole.
“No, no, no,” Tara muttered, scrambling to activate the laser beam emitter in her left index finger.
Atria grabbed her wrist. “Don’t,” she warned. “The atmosphere here is flammable, remember?”
“Only with the particle beam weapons,” Tara said. “Move your hand. Let me do this. If I can melt the two edges of the fabric back together it might just save your life.”
Through her faceplate, Atria smiled at her. Dark tendrils of brown gas swirled like smoke across her warming skin. The poisoned atmosphere of Earth had already gotten inside her suit.
“It’s too late,” Atria told her. “Guess it’s going to be up to you two. Without our ship, I don’t know if I was going to be able to survive anyway. Don’t know if any of us would. No offense, Tara.”
“No!” Tara shouted at her. “You shut up! Nobody else has to die today. Nobody else has to die.”
Because of me, she almost added. Nobody else needs to die because of me. It was her fault they were here. Just a few minutes back they had all been congratulating her on getting them here, to homeworld. What had been a triumph was now a nightmare.
Atria closed her eyes and lay back against Tyrese. She breathed deep, and Tara could see the brown gasses flowing into the sergeant’s flared nostrils. “Guess I’m going to get to see Crestin again. Me and him made a good team, you know? We were always together, in every campaign against alien invaders. There’s not as many as people think, you know? Oh, sure, we get lots of attacks, but it’s almost always the same eleven species after Earth. People think it’s boring working with the Academy, but my partnership with Overwatch has allowed me the opportunity to really see the universe, you know?”
She opened her eyes again and looked around them. “Don’t know what they want this place for, but maybe it would’ve been better just to let them have it.”
Tyrese eased up on the pressure he was keeping on the tear to Atria’s suit. What was the point now? The poison was already in her lungs. Would it kill her quickly, Tara wondered, or would it make her suffer?
“Yup,” Atria continued. “Crestin knew he loved me. He just couldn’t admit it. Big dumb bagging grump. He loved me. He just couldn’t say it.”
They waited, afraid of what would happen next.
“Guess I’ll never get a chance to have him say it now.”
The gasses outside her suit and inside her suit equalized, and now she was breathing pure Earth atmo. Tara tried not to cry.
They waited.
Atria’s eyes narrowed.
They waited some more.
Tyrese looked up at Tara.
Still, they waited.
“Uh,” Atria said, sitting up again. “Shouldn’t I be feeling something? Or, you know, dying?”
“You don’t feel anything?” Tyrese asked her.
“A little lightheaded, maybe.” Atria shrugged. “Honestly, I feel fine. The air sort of stinks. Like yesterday’s garbage, maybe, but it isn’t bad. Kind of leaves the inside of my mouth tingling but… shouldn’t I be dying?”
Tyrese snapped the fingers of his left hand out, activating the scanner, and held his palm about an inch over Atria’s helmet, moving in a circular motion around her head and shoulders. After he’d finished two complete scans, he brought the results up on the heads up display of his faceplate.
“You aren’t dying,” he said, which seemed like the most important thing to start with. “Your heartrate is up but let’s face it, all of our hearts are pounding a little faster right now. No sign of toxins. No indication of cellular necropsy or degeneration.”
He closed his hand, turning the scanner off, and then sat there staring at her in disbelief. “Apparently, Earth’s atmosphere is… breathable.”
“What?” Tara exclaimed. “How? Are you looking at this stuff?”
“It’s brown, it’s thick, and it stinks,” Tyrese confirmed. “Yeah, I’ve seen it. All I can tell you is what the scanner says. There is nothing wrong with Atria, and she’s breathing pure atmo
right now.”
“But, that’s impossible.”
“Scan her yourself,” he suggested, pointing to the scanner in her own glove.
“No, wait,” Atria told them. “Just, let me try…”
She reached up to her helmet, to the catches at the side, and it was all Tara could do not to tackle her and keep her from lifting it up off her head like that, but if she was already breathing the air around them nothing was going to make it worse.
Dropping the helmet back, letting it rest against the neckline of her envirosuit, Atria pushed herself up to her feet. She looked all around, blinking at everything, taking in deep breath after deep breath.
“I can breathe,” she said in amazement. “It fills your lungs, you know? But it’s breathable. You even kind of get used to the smell of it.”
She unslung her RFL from her back, setting it carefully on top of the rock that had trapped her arm and torn her suit so she wouldn’t have to worry about trying to reclaim it from the ground. Then she undid the seals and attachments on her envirosuit from her shoulders down to her hands. The gloves she tucked into the back of her utility belt. The tools would be useful.
The top part of the suit she let drop to hang loosely from around her trim waist.
Tara caught her breath and averted her eyes. They were all naked under their suits, and Atria’s breasts were exposed for their viewing, um, pleasure. Her rose-red skin was tickled with gooseflesh from the chilly temperature that hadn’t been an issue before. The deep brown tips of her breasts were stiff and peaked as well, and as she stretched, Tyrese’s eyes were pinned to Atria’s chest.
She slapped him hard on his shoulder. He had the good grace to look embarrassed, but that didn’t keep his eyes from drifting right back to where they had been.
“It feels amazing,” Atria was saying, completely oblivious to how she was showing off her body. Almost like swimming in the air. I just wish it was warmer. It tingles, but it doesn’t hurt. You two should try it.”
“No, thanks,” Tara sputtered.
“Sure,” was Tyrese’s simultaneous answer. He reached up for his helmet catches like he was about to go skinny dipping with Sergeant Atria Enverly right here in the open air of Earth.
“No,” Tara snapped, wrapping her gloves around his, keeping him from undoing anything. “Um, no, I mean. Listen. Atria is from the Kenta system, remember? Her biology is just that much different than ours.”
“Hey,” Atria said with a fleeting smile, “no need to be racist.”
“It’s got nothing to do with race. Your body is naturally acclimatized to a completely different atmosphere than ours are.”
She held up one hand, watching the muscles up and down her arm flex, admiring herself. “This is true. Just don’t pull any of that Kenta colony better-dead-than-red crap with me. Okay?”
“I wasn’t… I didn’t mean that!” Tara was flustered. She would never have said anything that derogatory. Sure, there were some humans who were elitist for their own people, whether it was colonists from a certain planet or those of a certain skin color, but as far as she was concerned there was few enough humans as it was. They needed to stick together, not make divisions among them based on lunacy like skin color or any other unique adaption like that. “Damn it, Atria, you know what I mean. If your biology is different enough to have made your skin a color unique from our human-on-Earth ancestors, isn’t it possible that you can breathe the air but we can’t?”
She shrugged one well-defined shoulder, and finally caught on to the way Tyrese was staring when her chest bounced with her movement. She smiled at him. “Yeah, I guess I see the difference now.”
Tara growled in frustration. They were stranded on an alien planet, and they had just witnessed Sergeant Crestin die, and Atria wanted to flirt with the only other man in the entire world?
Swallowing back a sharp comment about how she saw Tyrese first, she put her mind back on the problem of survival. “Tyrese. Keep your damn helmet on. You,” she said to Atria, “put your suit back on. We don’t know what else we’ll run into and we don’t need you freezing to death, either.”
“I’m fine,” Atria promised her. “My people aren’t as uptight about being naked around others as some other humans are. It’s just a body.”
Then she eyed Tyrese as she added, “It’s what you do with it that matters.”
Tyrese actually grinned back at her, and Tara wanted to smack the both of them with another falling boulder. “Can we just keep going? Please? I seriously don’t want to be outside after dark.”
“It’s not like we’re going to have a lot of options for shelter,” Tyrese pointed out, with one last glance over at Atria’s admittedly gorgeous body. “You think there’ll be anything at the destination coordinates?”
Tara sighed, glad to have the conversation off Atria and how much she loved to be naked. “I’m sure there will be something. That fission cell survived for a thousand years. It couldn’t have been out in the open. It had to be in something. The probe must have extracted it. The real question is, will whatever is there be enough to keep us safe until we can be rescued?”
“Well,” Atria said, threading one arm through the strap of her RFL, “then let’s go find out the answer to that question.”
Calling up the HUD again Tara found the trail, and started them that way. The landscape overlay was useful for finding the small rocks and hidden crevices in the ground that she would have missed otherwise, too. She made sure to call each one out to Atria, who was still refusing to put her suit and helmet back on. Tara tried not to let it bother her, but she’d seen the way that Tyrese had been ogling Atria. Was this going to be a problem between them? Not that they had been dating or together or anything, but she had thought they were moving in that direction. It had certainly seemed that way to her.
If he was going to follow the first half-naked woman who came across his path, though, what did that mean for them?
Off to the left, a safe distance away from them, God’s Hammer continued to burn. Tara thought briefly about going that way, soaking up the warmth of the fire, and maybe seeing if there was anything worth salvaging from the wreck. She knew there wouldn’t be anything left, however. She could tell that from here. Everything was gone. From Crestin to that seed that had given her so much hope that things could be different.
Tara began to walk away, determined to lead the rest of their crew safely to their destination.
“Wait,” Tyrese said quietly through the comms system in his helmet. Atria wouldn’t have been able to hear him so quietly, seeing as she had removed her helmet and half of her suit, so she knew he was speaking just to her. She turned back towards him and waited. “Atria,” he said, nodding his head towards the woman behind him.
Tara rolled her eyes and turned my attention towards our half-naked Sergeant. She paused, realizing that something was wrong.
Atria stood frozen, staring out towards the smoking wreck of the dropship. Her mouth hung open, and tears welled in her eyes. She shook her head back and forth and her lips moved, but no words came out.
Tara sighed, and slowly made her way toward the woman through the heavy sludge that clung to her boots. She put her hand on her shoulder, a comforting gesture, and spoke through her faceplate. “It will be alright, Atria. We’ll be alright. I’m sorry about your partner, but we’ve got to focus on what’s important right now.”
Atria continued to stare, oblivious to Tara’s words. She shook her head and muttered the words “no, no, no, no…” to herself.
Tara shot a worried look to Tyrese, who shrugged back. Atria finally pulled her attention away from the wreckage and turned toward Tara. Her skin had paled and her eyes were wide, and from her expression Tara knew that there was something more at stake here than simply their lives.
“You don’t understand,” Atria whispered.
Tara softened her expression and placed her hands on the woman’s shoulders. “What don’t I understand, Atria?”
The shocked woman shook her head, a single tear fell down her cheek and dropped from her chin. “We’re not going back. We’re lost. We won’t make it back before it happens. We have no way to protect ourselves from it. It’s coming.”
Tyrese approached them and took Atria by the hand. “There’s nothing coming, Sergeant. We’re here to complete a mission, and then we’ll send word back to Overwatch once they realize something has gone wrong. Overwatch will find a way to bring us home.”
Our situation was dire, but I knew he was right. The stakes were too high, and there’s no way they would just let their assets disappear. They’ve invested too much into us, into this mission. “He’s right, Atria. We just need to focus on the task at hand, and wait for Overwatch to come.”
“Overwatch doesn’t know,” she whispered.
Tyrese and Tara exchanged a worried glance.
“They don’t know, what, Atria?” Tara asked, her voice growing sterner.
When the Sergeant didn’t respond, she repeated, “What don’t they know?”
But Atria was gone, staring back at the flaming remnants of their ship. The toxic air may not be killing her, but it was making her delusional. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Tears continued to stream down her cheek, but still she did not speak. The three of them stood in silence, staring together at their only real hope of survival, destroyed, polluting the already destroyed environment around them.
Earth. They were stuck on Earth, and they didn’t know if they would be able to leave. Emotion she had never felt before welled up in Tara’s chest. They were on Earth, or at least a sickening image of what it was now. She thought of the seed burning away with the ship.
Looking around them, she saw the world that had once been their home. Things were definitely different. Just not in the way she’d expected.
CHAPTER NINE