by Doug Goodman
The DSMUs moved slowly through the trees, careful not to shake them lest they attract the monster’s eye.
Emily took them back to the mountains.
“We aren’t seriously going there, are we?” C.C. asked. “That thing was a mountain, remember?”
“We don’t have a choice. It’s the quickest way back to the Hab.”
“There is always a choice,” C.C. shot back.
“You have no power, C.C., so you can’t see what the rest of us see. The DSMUs are low on power. They weren’t designed for extended running. And we are all beat up physically and mentally. That’s obvious from the health monitors. We are way over our stress limits. It is almost 1600 hours. We have missed lunch, and now first dinner. The suits are recommending immediate rest and food.”
DOOOM!!!
A second blast resounded across the valley. The astronauts had started to climb the mountain with the strange peaks when the Jedik-ikik’s weapon surged a second time. This time, they had a good view of the blast. Plumes of smoke shot out of one end, and a small rocket out of the other. This time, the giant monster stepped away from the cannon fire. The rocket scorched over the valley and crashed into one of the mountains. A giant face of the mountain exploded. The mountainside began to cave in on itself, causing an enormous rock slide. The DSMUs held on to trees for balance while the mountain recoiled from the hit and the dust cleared.
A giant patch of skin lay beneath the rocks.
“We need to get off this mountain,” Anna said.
“Right.”
But the monster had already seen them. As it twisted to dodge the attack, its electric eyes caught the white of the DSMUs. The creature rolled its shoulders back and pulled back its arms.
“Run!” Emily said.
Cole was going out of his mind. He wished he’d never left the comfort of his professorship in Austin. He would be home with Emily and his nephew, and he certainly wouldn’t be running through an alien jungle, scaling a mountain that may or may not be a giant monster, while being shot at by lightning bolts by another impossibly gigantic rock monster.
Lightning burst from the center of the creature’s chest. Electric chains sidewinded through the sky, crashing into the mountain. Like the others, he could feel his hairs standing on end just before the lightning storm hit them. He didn’t have time to wonder if this was out of fear or if it was because of the increased amount of electricity in the air.
A blue cord flashed in front of him. Cole stopped in his tracks to avoid the burn. Then he jumped over a bright white heat just as it struck the ground where he’d been standing. It was like trying to escape the effects of a massive Tesla coil. He hoped he’d live.
3
Somehow, unbelievably, they all survived the lightning storm. They’d reached the mountain’s serrated peaks. They could see the Ascent Vehicle on the other side.
“OGRA,” Emily said into her com, “I want all drones to follow the monster and record its movement. Keep a distance of at least fifty meters from the monster. Have the video ready to play when we get back to the Hab.”
“Yes, Commander Musgrove.” The four drones pushed wide to video the monster.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
“Oh, no,” Cole said.
The mountain shuddered.
“Did you hear that?” C.C. asked.
“I felt it,” Mathieu said.
Emily jumped down off the peak 6 meters to the next lower steps. “Keep moving!”
Like a robotic mountain goat, she hopped, stepped, and maneuvered down the mountainside. She was thankful for the robustness of her mech’s gyroscopes. They were the only thing keeping her from stumbling into a roll and falling off the shifting mountain. Rocks tumbled around her as more aftershocks threw the astronauts to the ground.
“I don’t think the DSMUs were designed for this,” Cole said.
“We’re in ops reserve mode now, Cole,” Emily said. “Design is off the table.”
Cole took her DSMU’s hand in his, and they both jumped off a cliff face. The problem was not that they hit the ground but that the ground hit them. The rock rose up to hit them. The two DSMUs fell back onto the ledge with C.C., Anna, and Mathieu.
The mountain monster was rising up, and they were no more than little birds on its back.
The creature roared. Its voice was dark and loud and sounded like a hundred heavy metal concerts going on at the same time. The creature was so immense they could not see its head. But they could feel the pressure change as the mountain rose up in the sky. Within seconds, they were a few hundred meters higher in the air than they were before. Emily’s ear popped.
“Well, there goes the climbing option,” Cole said.
“There’s more than one way to get off this mountain,” Emily said. She reached down and pressed a button on her mech’s lower legs. The three panels shot off, exposing robust rocket launchers.
“You can’t be serious,” Mathieu said. “Even if we’d done the math and tracked the flight, those are one-time use solid rocket boosters. Once ignited, there’s no stopping them. They’ll launch us out of the atmosphere, and then what?”
To respond, Emily ripped off the connecting plate on her lower rocket boosters and removed the upper boosters. “That should be enough to get us off the mountain.”
“Should be?” Anna asked, credulous. “Now you’re sounding like your husband.”
Emily looked at Cole. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“How the hell do we steer?” Mathieu shouted over the rumbling mountain. The mountain twisted, nearly knocking the astronauts over the ledge.
“The same way I steered during EDL. Use the Abort Landing screen to give manual control of the DSMU to you.”
“And what? Fly like Superman?”
To respond, she handed C.C.’s mech to Anna. Emily grabbed her husband’s DSMU by the waist.
Inside his DSMU, Cole was frantically grabbing his shoulder harness and locking himself down.
“Shit, baby, not again!”
Emily leaned down. Sparks shot from her DSMU’s hands, lighting the solid rocket boosters. In a spray of sparks and vapor and flame, she and Cole launched off the mountain.
Emily was smiling.
4
The first three seconds were fine because the rockets shot straight up. After that, everything went to hell in a handbasket. Unlike ascent/descent, where the direction of travel is mostly up or down, Emily was trying to steer herself southward, which meant flying horizontally. The SRBs didn’t like that, and the laws of aerodynamics were not in her favor. Her mech was not built with flight in mind, so control was a joke. They were going wherever the laws of physics took them. She quickly learned to stiffen the arms and legs of the mobility unit and use slight changes in the SRBs to create lift along a horizontal plane. This stabilized her craft after six loops in the air that had culminated in a dive-bomb straight to the ground that was as graceful as a first-time RC plane enthusiast.
That they did not die was due at least in part to how high they were when they started their escape. If they had tried this from sea level, she was pretty sure they would have collided into the ground.
But she was off the mountain.
Suddenly, Emily pulled out, and they were flying.
“I think I puked in my helmet,” Cole said.
“Don’t get comfortable. I still need to figure out how to land this thing before we overshoot the landing site by a continent or two. Don’t worry, though. I’ve got an idea.”
“I hope it’s not like New Orleans.”
“No, no. New Orleans was totally different. Well, mostly.”
“We crashed!”
“But I’ve learned so much since then. Trust me, Cole.”
Cole checked his straps.
The DSMU was built with over three dozen individual “eyeholes” around the suit’s “head.” This was the ARGES System. ARGES was short for Augmented Reality Global Exploration Syst
em, and it allowed the DSMU pilot to see 360 degrees at all times. Because of the ARGES, Emily could see that the rest of her crew had escaped the mountain.
The mountain itself was something out of a monster movie. The peaks were the spine of the long creature, which was so massive that it dwarfed the lightning monster. It had long stalagmite and stalactite teeth, giant claws, and a long tail.
The two monsters ignored the crew. They were focused on the city, which was fine by Emily. As they marched to Ximortikrim, Emily hoped to survive long enough to see the footage. Why were they attacking the city, and why were the inhabitants of the city rising up from the grave? There were mysteries to solve. She hoped to live to find the answers.
She switched out her hand with her machete. She swung the machete at her left leg. The swing made her DSMU spin, but once she connected with the SRB, the booster went flying off. She swung at the other SRB, and it went flying off, too.
“Great. Now we’re falling,” Cole said.
As high up as they were (Cole’s altimeter read 2000 meters), Cole knew that this was not a safe height for parachuting, much less doing whatever the hell they were doing. Emily struggled to push her hands and legs forward, fighting against the drag of air coming up against the DSMU. With all her weariness weighing on her, she struggled to move her appendages. She grunted and growled as she forced her appendages forward.
Cole guessed they had twenty seconds before they would be set on a collision course with the ground, and no matter what his wife did, there would be no escape. No last second pull-out.
“Come on!” Emily shouted as she forced the arms slowly outward.
“Push harder,” Cole said. He reached out for her arms, but being slung over her back, he didn’t have many options to help. He could try to push her legs down and hit his emergency landing oxygen release tanks.
Ten seconds.
He pushed hard, but the drag was too much. He just wasn’t in the right position for saving them. Emily had the angle of attack that could work. Outside, sonic booms ricocheted. They were breaking the sound barrier.
“You’ve got to do this, Emily. I don’t want to feel the back of my skull coming through the front of my skull.”
She grunted something. Slowly, her arms and legs moved in the right direction.
Five seconds.
Her right arm snapped back, like she’d touched a hot wire.
Three seconds.
“Screw it. Punch it!” Emily said. She hit the emergency landing button and hoped that her arms and legs didn’t rip the suit apart.
BSHHHHH!!!
The sound was like fire ripping from a flamethrower. It was thick and full of energy.
They didn’t die, and her arms and legs weren’t ripped apart. She could feel the difference in drag, the pause of lift under her DSMU’s chest. She hit the emergency landing button again. Oxygen ejected from the arms and legs of her DSMU.
They didn’t come to a gentle landing, but the DSMUs weren’t obliterated, either. They rolled (per their descent programming) to a safe location and stood up, covered in dust and carbon burns.
Cole fell to his knees.
Emily checked her DSMU’s readings. “Cole, we made fifteen hundred kilometers per hour. That’s the record for fastest freefall. Certainly the record for fastest freefall on 51 Golgotha.”
Cole was retching again. “That was like a roller coast without a track.”
Around them, Anna and Mathieu landed easily, feet first.
“How’d you do that?” Emily asked.
“Emergency shutoff screen. We tried relaying it to you, but I don’t think you heard,” Mathieu said.
They watched as the two giant monsters moved toward Ximortikrim.
“All this effort to get here to study a new alien culture, and they’re going to pulverize it,” Cole said.
Emily put her hand on his shoulder, and he took her hand in his. The other three climbed out of their DSMUs while OGRA’s robots brought the DSMUs to the recharge stations.
“I want these samples analyzed tonight,” C.C. told Anna. “This expedition is going down the tubes, and I don’t want to come home empty-handed. We still have a company to support.”
The JEVS aboard the Anchor pinged Emily as she walked into the Hab. Every step felt like moving through a strong snowstorm. Her feet hurt. She could barely pull them up the stairs without stumbling on the steps.
Inside, Emily popped off her helmet and dumped it on the floor. The smell of the Hab (peppermint, as determined by the Human Performance people back in Houston) was fresh in her nose. It was a much better smell than the one coming from her suit. She’d been running and flying in the AXES for over ten hours now.
Her crew looked as deflated as Emily felt. They had gone way over budget on personal energy reserves, and that would have been on a day when they were fully rested. None of them had slept well the previous night, and they were all up early in the morning. They needed sleep.
“Everyone, we need to rest.”
“But Ximortikrim,” Cole said.
“I have analysis to complete,” Anna added.
Emily looked into their tired, baggy eyes and said, “OGRA can monitor the monsters and finish your analysis. She’ll alert us if they head this way. But right now, we all need to sleep.”
She dimmed the lights. Cole was watching the devastation on the monitors. The creatures were moving toward Ximortikrim. Every step was a small bump in the Hab. Emily turned off the monitor screen. Cole followed her to her room. They pulled off their AXES suits and fell into bed together, instantly asleep.
5
The Hab’s gentle shaking woke Emily. She quickly turned on a screen to check on the monsters. The bedroom’s side screen showed not two, but now three giant monsters standing among the mountains, giant pits all that were left from where they had lain. The monsters were staring at a fourth mountain, but nothing was happening.
Cole was still sound asleep. She moved his arm off her shoulder and slipped out from underneath him. She checked the time. 0500 hours. Had she really slept that long? She stretched from her back to her ankles. It was one of those really good morning stretches. The kind that starts slow and ends up moving through the entire body. She twisted her neck, popping it, and brushed back her short, punky hair.
She grabbed a towel and entered her shower. The water, which was superheated at the ISRU Station, was already hot when she turned on the faucet.
While she showered, she pulled up the shower screen so she could keep an eye on them. The giant monsters would shift their weight while they stood over the fourth mountain. With each step, the Hab shook a little. We will need a name for the creatures, Emily thought. If C.C. was going to have an extinct animal named for him, maybe she could get one of these monsters named for her. The Musgrovesaur, or Emily-zilla. Then again, maybe they should leave the name-picking to the biologist.
She checked with JEVS, who had pinged her as she arrived in the Hab last night. JEVS did not respond, which was a little odd, but she guessed he was on the far side of the planet. In a few minutes, he would be back in radio contact and ready to talk about last night’s ping. She assumed it was just to let her know that the Anchor had moved into the requested orbit.
She went back to the drones and surveyed Ximortikrim. She nearly slipped in the shower, she was so shocked.
“Cole,” she called out.
He mumbled and threw a pillow at her.
On the screen, Ximortikrim was flurrying with activity, like an anthill that had been stepped on or a beehive that had been whacked like a piñata. Thousands of the Jedik-ikik were now alive and running around the city. The dome and the military compound were the two busiest buildings, but every building, including the First Pyramid, was buzzing. The Jedik-ikik were preparing for war. But it was more than that. Some of the Jedik-ikik were being laid out against walls and killed, spears to the head. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she knew everyone needed to see this.
“OGR
A, please wake everyone,” Emily said. “The city is…is alive. We need to make preparations. I think a war is about to break out.”
OGRA said, “The rest of the crew is already awake, except for Cole.”
“What?”
“Doctors Anna Altieri, Mathieu De Pleises, and Chris ‘C.C.’ Crenshaw are already awake.”
“Location?”
“Dr. Anna Altieri is in the main room, and Doctors Mathieu De Pleises and Chris ‘C.C.’ Crenshaw are returning from the Geological Survey Rover to the Hab.”
Emily shut off the shower, toweled herself off, and put on her mission suit. “Cole, wake up,” she said, pushing down on the bed.
“It’s Story time,” he said, half in a dream.
“Cole,” Emily said again, this time more sternly. Cole’s eyes fluttered open. Seeing his wife’s demeanor, he bolted up.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Get up. The rest of the crew is already awake.”
“The monsters?”
“They’re no current danger to us.”
“Wait. Then what’s the problem?” He rolled his fists around his eyes and yawned.
“I don’t know. But I can feel it. Can’t you?”
He blinked his eyes.
“Get dressed.”
Emily went into the main room. C.C. and Mathieu had just entered the Hab. They were still in their AXES suits, looking at something Anna was showing them.
“Good morning,” Emily said, not sure where to start.
C.C. glanced up at her, then went back to counseling Anna. “That is good work, Anna. I want you to send that back to the Anchor.”
“The Anchor is on the far side of the planet. You can’t reach it,” Emily said.
Anna glanced at Emily before asking C.C., “Do you think we can begin today?”
“We’ll have to. Mathieu, you have the Ascent Vehicle prepped?”
Mathieu nodded.
“Prepped?” Emily asked, shocked. “Who told you to prep the Ascent Vehicle?”
C.C. exhaled. On the table, he pulled up a message and flipped it around so that she could read it. She recognized it as Charter Eighteen.
“What is this?” she asked. She knew what it was for, but wasn’t sure why it was being invoked.