Avraam was by far the most skilled with either sword or rifle. The Russian understood how to wield the blade in cooperation with his plasmix field even better than Wu Gwei did. This wasn’t because he had done it before or he had spent time practicing. It was all instinct. The cyborg had watched him, trying to understand and learn from the Georgian warrior. There didn’t seem to be a trick. The weapons responded to him in an almost magical way.
The hope was that they would not need any of the arms on Tertius-5 and that the defensive fields were just there to protect them from the hostile planet’s environment. They very quickly saw that this wasn’t to be the case.
Charlie, Avraam, Wu Gwei, and Kalligeneia walked together on foot from the shuttle. The Queen followed a short distance behind them holding her video camera and recording the entire mission. Ms. Brightly and Dr. Aelfwyrd were on duty inside of the shuttle. Back on the Shamballa, Veronika was on duty. Allambree was not officially on duty, but he sat with Veronika watching the mission on screen.
Charlie walked out onto the Cosmic Shag first. He knew roughly what to expect, but was still surprised to see how the energy suit managed to keep his feet from sinking into the biomass. He walked the first few steps uncertainly, and then found his footing and walked normally. Beneath him, the ground appeared to wiggle. Crimson pseudopods from the biomass rubbed curiously against the energy beneath the soles of his boots. They were fairly uniform in height, orderly. Each was about half as wide as his fist. Charlie wondered what they would do if his flesh were exposed. Would they try to eat him? Drag him under? Dissolve him? Or were they just curious?
“Eee!” Kalligeneia shrieked. “Look at them. They’re like millions and millions of little penises!” She lifted up her feet, as if looking for a stool to jump up on.
Charlie saw Wu Gwei turn up his nose, not enjoying Kalligeneia’s sense of humor.
“There may be millions, but they are very very tiny,” Avraam said to Kalligeneia. “You know, they say it is size, not quantity!”
Wu Gwei held the scanner. “Actually, some of them reach down for miles.”
“Why are they all the same height?” Charlie asked.
“They’re cooperating” Wu Gwei replied. “Every stalk gets its equal share of sunlight, air, and radiation.”
“But there must be billions of them, is that possible?” the captain asked.
“Maybe they’re all a single being. Or maybe they imagine they’re all watching the same TV show. Don’t the billions of cells in your body cooperate with each other?” Kalligeneia countered.
“Mostly,” Charlie smirked.
The plasma around each member of the team was a different color. Charlie’s was blue, Kalligenia’s was yellow. Avraam’s glow was green. Wu Gwei’s was orange and Gloryannana’s was purple. Kalligeneia had asked for red, since it was her color, but Wu Gwei insisted that no one would be able to see her on this planet if she were camouflaged.
They had a short fifteen minute walk and then they would have to descend about a mile and a half into the biomass. No one was sure what it would be like down there, but their sensors had picked up an energy reading which they believed might be a ship buried in the shag. They were worried that it could be Nayara’s missing shuttle.
From time to time, a lone pseudopod would lift up like a whip or a lasso and try to wrap itself around one of the team. The swords cut through the tubes easily enough, but it was harrowing all the same. The biomass didn’t react when each attacking limb was cut. The ground didn’t shift. There was no counterstrike. The Cosmic Shag didn’t seem to mind. Doctor Aelfwyrd had estimated that there were over ten million trillion of the stalks across the planet.
When they reached the right point, Wu Gwei began to cut a sloping passage down into the living carpet. He had been holding a scanner all of that time and it apparently also doubled as a powerful drilling laser. Charlie was sure he had to be imagining it, but he could swear he smelled burning hair as the beam cut into the red alien tubes. With surprising speed, he cut a tunnel large enough for them to walk into.
“Why doesn’t the roof fall in on us when you cut into the sides of the tubes?” Charlie asked.
Kalligeneia answered. “For the same reason why the shag is all the same height: The brothers and sisters of the severed tubes hold them up. I bet they’re healing each other, closing the wounds where they can. We should be careful that the tunnel doesn’t seal up behind us.”
Once they got a few meters down into the growth, they began to see creatures hiding amongst the stalks. There were thin, big eyed insects which were camouflaged to blend in with the bright red biomass. There was a fuzzy black shape which always scurried away when the excavation brought it into the light. Charlie wasn’t sure, but it might have been similar to a beetle, maybe a cartoon beetle?
Then there were long and thin bright green snakes with red eyes. They looked frightened and offended at the opening up of their biome to the surface. The lower halves of their bodies were just like terrestrial serpents, but they did have arms with little primitive fingers. It looked like there might have been three or four fingers to each hand.
There was a squeaking sound here and there, which Charlie suspected came from the serpents, but he wasn’t sure.
“Charlie, I need you to move a little to the left. And can you take your hands out of your pockets?” Gloryannana started directing.
“This isn’t a movie,” Charlie replied.
“Of course it is. You’re going to want to watch this over and over and delight in how sexy everyone looks,” the Queen replied.
“Do you think I look sexy?” Avraam asked the Queen, a huge smile on his face.
“Oh, you’re a big sexy beast, Avi. Everyone knows that.”
Wu Gwei snorted. He turned to Charlie. “The boy is easily flattered.”
Avraam was blushing.
Charlie nearly stepped on one of the serpents. It ducked off into the reeds, but just before it disappeared he could have sworn it almost looked like it shook its fist at him in a particularly human way. He paused, in shock at what he thought he’d seen.
“Do we know anything about the local fauna?” Charlie asked the group.
“We have no information about the world at all, except the little hints we could find in Nayara’s notes. We have pretty good maps of the surface, good enough to know she’s been here and back again. And then we have that cryptic note: Crew minus one,” Kalligeneia replied.
“The missing member of the crew?” Wu Gwei suggested.
“Perhaps.” Kalligeneia sounded unconvinced.
“Maybe it means we all died here once before?” Avraam shouted. He was still smiling.
“How would she remember? Unless… she found our corpses,” Charlie thought out loud.
“I’ll never understand why they didn’t give us a psychic or a medium for our crew,” Kalligeneia mused.
“You believe in all of that?” Charlie asked her.
“Of course. I’m not an idiot,” She replied with a smirk.
“Well, if you believe in psychics, don’t you think we could develop the powers in ourselves?” Avraam asked.
“We could become more intuitive, sure. We should be doing that anyway, that’s just a part of the journey of the mind. But the real psychics are born with it: the granddaughter of the granddaughter of a witch who escaped the burnings in Salem.”
Gloryannana laughed. “I used to know some good psychics. It’s not public knowledge, but the crown has always had its official magician: the Merlin. But even they were only right about half the time. And what crazy people. Maybe the looniest!”
“Did your tarot card reader tell you to expect to be re-born from a radio signal after you died?” Charlie asked.
“Charlie, everyone knew humanity would sing about me for eternity.”
As they cut deeper into the shag, the sky was left behind. The only light came from the dimly glowing plasmix fields around the five crew members. There were a lot of shadows and indi
stinct movements in the cilia. It was hard to tell what might have been an animal and what was just the pseudopods themselves moving back and forth or preparing for their next attack. Charlie’s instinct told him that there were eyes all around him.
One of the red tubes lashed itself around his right arm, the one he held the sword in. It tried to pull him into the wall and it did manage to move him a foot or two until he was able to pull back. He transferred the blade to his left hand and managed to make an awkward slash against the biomass. He swung two more times and finally cut the tube which had attacked him. It went limp as soon as he severed it. Then he had to unwrap and drop the limb to the ground. He was surprised by how heavy it was.
“You say these things go down for miles?” Charlie asked.
“That seems likely,” Wu Gwei answered as he controlled the scanner/ drill.
“How come we can fight them? Shouldn’t they be as strong as mountains?”
“It’s just the tips- ” Kalligeneia started to make a joke, but started giggling too much to finish it. Avraam started laughing hysterically with her.
They continued down. Wu Gwei seemed to alter the slope just a little bit, making their walk steeper. No one complained. They understood that it meant they would get there sooner.
A rock appeared on the side of the passage. It appeared to be made of shiny black mica, or something very similar. Charlie put his hand on it. “This might be the top of the Tertius-5 Himalayas.”
“Tertius-5 is a horrible name for a planet. It’s more like an identity badge number. I’m going to give this world a real name,” Gloryannana said
“It’s actually a very practical name. Even if we all die and come back, we’ll know it’s the fifth world of the third solar system,” Wu Gwei pointed out.
“Third solar system is subjective. If we all get strangled by the shag, the next us’es will call this system Primus. Or maybe New Sol. Or Alpha,” Gloryannana dismissed him.
“Should we call it Mellifluous?” Avi suggested.
“Aw. You’re sweet. I was thinking we should give call it the planet Cosmic Shag.”
“Cosmic Shag is a name?” Charlie questioned.
“It is now.”
“Sounds like a dance,” Charlie joked.
“We don’t call Earth ‘Humans,’” Kalligeneia objected.
“Aren’t we Earthlings? Aren’t we Terrans?” The Queen won her argument.
Veronika’s voice came over the communicator, “Can you take a rock sample?”
“I was just about to do that very thing,” Kalligeneia replied as she reached the outcropping. She already had a small sample container in her hand.
“Yum! I can’t wait to get my paws in that.” Veronika’s voice oozed with excitement for the alien rock.
As they continued their descent, the pseudopods were grabbing at the team less and less. Some of them seemed to grow thicker. At the surface, they were all the same bright red color, almost the same shade as Kalligeneia’s skin. Lower down, everything was still red, but the hues began to change. There was more variation between stalks. The darker ones were almost purple, and there were a half dozen shades in-between.
And then, Wu Gwei fell.
The tubes beneath him simply gave way. He fell quickly and silently. At first, his absence was only obvious because the sound of his drill was gone. Avraam quickly ran over towards where the cyborg had been standing, and the ground opened up beneath him as well. He tried to grab onto the tubes and almost managed it.
Almost.
“No one move,” Charlie ordered. He instinctively spread his legs out and wrapped his wrist around one of the severed pseudopods.
“Stead yourselves,” Kalligeneia added.
Charlie looked back and only then noticed that Gloryannana was gone as well. The openings weren’t only ahead of him.
“Is this an attack?” Charlie shouted. “Is the biomass doing this on purpose, or did we find an instab-”
Before he finished his sentence, Charlie was falling. He looked behind him as the ground gave way. He and Kalligeneia locked eyes. She looked terrified. She held her gun in one hand and was raising her open hand to cover her crimson mouth.
But she was gone in a microsecond. Charlie was sliding down a cluster of the living chords. His shield was still covering him, but he was falling at a tremendous rate. In the distance he could hear a sound which might have been a woman screaming. He didn’t know if it was Gloryannana or Kalligeneia.
He saw a huge face pass by, another one of the serpents, but that one had to be as large as their shuttle. The monster’s reptilian tongue snaked out and appeared to be reaching out for him. But it disappeared as he whizzed past. He was very worried about it following him.
He began to see and feel bumps on the sides of the pseudopods. At first they were quite painful, but his speed began to drop. They looked like fungus or parasites feeding on the sides of the gigantic stalks. As he got lower, the bumps got larger. The tumorous protrusions reminded him of the lumpy shapes trees will take after being struck with a disease or having limbs sawed off.
There was light all around him, but he couldn’t tell where it came from. It wasn’t terribly bright, but at no point on the way down was there any darkness, no matter how thickly the tubes squeezed together.
Just when he felt like he could maybe grab ahold of the sides and he begin trying to stop himself, the world opened up beneath him. The red stalks disappeared and he found himself falling through the air. Beneath him he saw a village of stone buildings. There were clusters of houses, three or four stories tall, and a small arena. In the distance, he could see a body of yellow water. And beyond that, the red tubes abruptly sloping away, creating the hollow space which he was falling into.
The ground was at least another hundred feet below him.
He watched as an orange blur fell to the ground. There were shapes moving around it, living beings. He couldn’t tell if they were human, humanoid, or insects.
And then the ground zoomed up towards him. Charlie found himself face to face with a stone brick road.
2
The stone broke. And then so did Charlie’s protective bubble. The blue flashed blindingly bright as he impacted with the street and then went out, dissipating briefly into a cloud of blue smoke. His body snapped back and seemed to vibrate up and down for about ten seconds before he found himself lying on the ground. The plasmix layer was completely gone, his helmet had been torn away, and he had alien dust in his mouth.
His nose was bleeding. His vision was blurred. Reflexively, he closed his eyes and opened his third. He saw a trail of orange energy winding its way through the stone, like a cloud of smoke or a cluster of stars. He had the sensation that it was more real than the rock his chest lay upon. And then the headache hit. He felt like scalding water was rushing through his brain, like a bee was trapped inside of his skull. He held both of his hands over the third eye and pressed, trying to block out all of the light. Slowly, he closed that eye and managed to open the other two again.
His suit was torn. Pieces were falling off. He looked around and saw that he was surrounded by a crowd of the serpents. There were dozens. Some of them held weapons which looked like long and massive shards of red and yellow crystal. These creatures were seven or eight feet tall. He understood then that the tiny snakes he had seen at the surface had only been the children.
“Haffaharah,” the snakes said. “Haffaharah,” more and more of them repeated. It sounded like an accusation to Charlie.
There was a massive crash and a nearby building seemed to explode. A burst of yellow light told Charlie that Kalligeneia had just impacted through the stone ceiling. He ran over towards it, through the throng of frightened and startled alien serpents. He touched his hand against the shoulder of one as he passed by; its skin felt like hot leather.
He found the mother of monsters lying in a small crater on top of what must have once been a fire pit. The home was very primitive. The creatures were obviously i
ntelligent, but not technological. There was no electricity, no books, nothing complicated. It reminded him of Earth five thousand years or more before he was born.
Kalligeneia was vomiting. One of her fingers was twisted back and broken, but otherwise she appeared to be unhurt. Charlie reached for her, but at that moment the creatures grabbed him. He watched as two of the aliens pounced upon Kalligeneia. The serpents made Charlie imagine centaurs. The bottom half of their anatomy was just like a massive snake’s. The torsos and arms were almost human, although the three fingered stubby hands were less advanced. Their faces were flat and wide like a human being’s, but the eyes were red and the skin on most of them was so very bright green. They didn’t have scales. If anything, their smooth hide made Charlie think of whales and dolphins.
One of them held Charlie up against a wall and brought its face in close to his, almost as if it was going to bite him. “Haffaharah!” It shouted again and again.
So, he decked it.
Charlie punched the serpent in the jaw, shocking the extra-terrestrial. He struck again, and then a third time. But just as he had forced the one beast off of him, two others grabbed his arms and held him down. Charlie was crushed against the cobblestones. He face was squished against the rock. They spat on him. They shouted and clawed.
Then they dragged him off to their jail.
July 2065
“This is terrible.” The doctor grimaced as he harvested the noses from Charlie’s body. “You understand that your client insured each of these noses for $7,000, correct? I can’t deliver a damaged one. You are going to be liable for the broken nose.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Charlie answered.
The procedure was very painful. He had already had six foreign noses harvested from his legs. The last nose, the broken nose, was the one on his shoulder: the one which had been broken by the same men who stole his stardust leather jacket.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 27