Dropship One

by L. D. P. Samways

  “Okay, well done on your teamwork today. You should all be very proud of yourselves. This was no small feat. You attacked and dismantled an enemy force that you knew nothing about. Not to mention, you all toppled a gigantic dinosaur that was sure to rip each and every one of us to shreds. So well done, pat yourselves on the back. But, let’s not forget, we are here to finish this mission off. So grab your shit and follow me, because we have a rescue craft and its crew members to account for,” he said, reloading another mag into his railgun.

  We all locked and loaded. We did a head count. We hadn’t suffered any casualties. We were all accounted for. Even the native was in good health. The only people missing were the very few that had ran away. I’d suggested to Spooks that maybe we should search for them, and bring them back to the surface. After all, the Marines have a motto, leave no man behind. But, Spooks didn’t feel it necessary. So we decided to leave them behind. They were most likely dead anyhow. The mine shafts below were rather large, and we had only gone down one route. Those men were as good as dead if there were more pirates in there.

  “Let’s move out, then!” Spooks said, rallying us forward.

  We walked past the downed creature, all of us getting a glimpse of the gory aftermath of the firefight. Chunks of reptiles were skewed across the sand, making it difficult for the majority of us to walk unimpeded. There was a lot of walking around body parts. The sand was squelchy and unpleasant. But soon enough, we had reached the edge of the forest and were back to stepping into the unknown. This time however, the unknown wasn’t the darkness of the mineshaft or its caves. It was the claustrophobic density of trees and shrubs. Alien wildlife in the brush. And a rescue crew that needed rescuing themselves.

  We certainly had our work cut out for us. But we had already come this far, so there was no point in dwelling on the misfortune that we had already suffered. You had to think positively. And I was positive after all this was over, a nice steak dinner was in order. I was famished. Tired. Grouchy. But hey, being a Marine wasn’t pleasant. Fighting aliens wasn’t fun. But it was necessary. And finding the crew of our rescue aircraft was mandatory.

  No questions asked… Leave no man behind… Unless they leave you to fight a hundred-foot creature from outa space that is.

  Chapter Five

  In search of rescue, the forest, Tribeca Planet

  The forest was hard to traverse. Loose fitted leaves and twigs kept us from gaining good ground. Some of the men were tripping over themselves. Whilst others were just dog-tired by now. Most of our canteens were empty. I hadn’t had a drink for a while. My mouth felt as dry as the desert dust that kept finding its way into my suits ventilation system. This was now the second time since I’d set foot in the forest that I had to stop in my tracks and clean out the filter on my tank. The thing is, most of the men were doing the same thing as me. They were all nursing their suits, taping up holes in the fabric, cleaning out their guns and generally taking their sweet time. Spooks was the only Marine who seemed to have his shit together, while everybody else was lollygagging behind, licking their wounds and chit chatting amongst themselves.

  I tapped the filter on its side with my hand and watched as a flurry of dust seeped out of all the ventilation holes. The dust and dirt debris hit the floor. The ground itself was moist, which was surprising. Ever since setting foot on this planet I had noticed that there was hardly any water. The sun burnt hot in the sky, and the result of such a hot sun was the blistering desert terrain that surrounded us. But this forest was humid. The leaves and bushes that surrounded us were a ripe green. Some of them were dripping with condensation. So hopefully there was some sort of river nearby.

  I could only hope. Then again – this could be a mirage of some sorts. I wouldn’t bet against it. I was tired, and so was everybody else. Even though we’d all been through a lot, who’s to say that the beast we had just fought was real? Maybe it was a mirage as well. I smiled as I put the filter back into my suits ventilation system. I twisted it back into place and heard a satisfying clunk as it locked back shut.

  “Something funny there, recruit?” Spooks said as he sidled up beside me.

  Since everybody had followed my lead and decided to stop in their tracks to catch their breath, Spooks took it upon himself to quiz me on my mental well-being. I suppose I’d looked a state. Was probably as pale as a ghost. I certainly felt like a ghost. Every time I moved, it felt as if my body was a few seconds in front of my mind. It was causing a distractingly blurry effect as I walked. Like there was an aura around me, and every time I took a step forward, the aura pulsated, as if it was trying to escape the tomb that I called my body.

  “No sir, just thinking, that’s all,” I said, trying to reassure Spooks with a smile. But he wasn’t buying it. I guess he saw things differently. And I probably would as well if I could have seen the absolute state that I was in.

  I was covered in blood. Probably some of it belonging to recruits that were no longer with us. I know for a fact that my suit was caked in mud and dirt. The once pristine silver suit was now a dull black. Only specs of the original colour could be seen under certain lighting conditions. And the forest that we were in was far from light. It was dark. It was dingy. And it was claustrophobic.

  “Well Jensen, I suggest that you don’t preoccupy yourself with thinking. All I need you to be doing is aiming your gun and covering your fellow Marines. Thinking will get you killed. Thinking doesn’t belong on the battlefield. The only thoughts that should be running through your head is the thought of survival. And the only way to survive is if you switch off and become one with your gun. So I suggest you do as I say, and if you can, try and keep up. These men are just as tired as you. And it looks as if they look up to you. They should. You have performed well today. But I am your leader. The Commander. So, please, follow me and make sure there are no stragglers left behind. We need every man we can get. Keep an eye on the native for Christ’s sake. If we lose him, then we are fucked. As far as I’m concerned, it’s mission over if he dies,” Spooks said, patting me on the shoulder and turning back around.

  Without saying anything else, he began to move further into the woods. I momentarily turned around to see the expression on my fellow troops’ faces. They looked fed up. But, there was no rest for the wicked.

  “Come on boys, not too far to go now. I can smell smoke, so the aircraft can’t be too far from here. Once we get to it, then we are that much closer to seeing a pair of breasts again!” I said, smiling at the men. Some of them cheered. Most of them remained quiet. But all of them had smiles on their faces. And that’s what matters at least. No one wants to die sad.

  We followed Spooks into the unknown. With every step we took, the smell of smoke became stronger. Even though our spacesuits were locked off from the atmosphere, the suits were fitted with special chips that simulated certain smells. After all, the sense of smell is an important one in combat. It’s an important one in survival. And if we were all going to survive this thing, then we would need all the senses we had.

  “A waterfall!” Somebody said in the back, I turned around and saw one of the Marines running toward an opening in the bushes.

  Twigs and leaves snapped under every footstep the man took. I had my gun gripped tightly in my hand, shaking slightly as I watched the Marine disappear through the bush. For a second or two, I didn’t know what to do. Part of me wanted to carry on, and get to the crash site. The area around us was smoky, so I knew that the aircraft must’ve landed nearby. And if it was on fire, then the people inside it would need rescuing. I couldn’t imagine burning alive. And I didn’t want to find charred corpses when I got there. But then, the other part of me knew that every man was needed on this operation. We couldn’t suffer any more casualties. But then again, I wasn’t their commander. Spooks was. And before I even had to make a decision on the spot, Spooks was already telling us to follow the AWOL Marine through the bush. And that’s exactly what we did.

  “Jesus Christ, he wasn’t
wrong!” I said as I made my way through the makeshift hole in the bushes.

  As I climbed through the bush, I could feel twigs and thorns poking into my suit. An alarm went off in my heads-up-display, telling me that I was close to puncturing the material that the suit was made of. But luckily, I escaped with only a minor scratch. The suit was still intact. It was better to be safe than sorry. According to the natives on this planet, the air was breathable to humans. But just because it was breathable, didn’t mean that it was safe. All sorts of bugs and viruses could be present in the air. Bugs and viruses that could affect the humans autoimmune system. But I wasn’t worried about the scratch. My mind was elsewhere. And my sights were on what I thought was a mirage at first. The classic desert oasis Mirage. Water. And plenty of it. Gushing down charcoal coloured rocks. The Marine that had spotted it had taken his helmet off and was drinking the water with cupped hands.

  “What are you doing? The water could be polluted!” I heard Spooks say as he approached the man drinking from the waterfall.

  I couldn’t blame the guy really. The water looked amazing. It was as crystal clear as you could ever imagine it to be. It was like something out of one of those bottled water commercials. The ones that suggest that their product is the purest and the most refreshing of all. I was half tempted to drink from the waterfall. But I wasn’t going to be taking my helmet off anytime soon. And neither were the rest of the troop. They just watched, envious, as the man drank from the natural springs.

  “Somebody do a scan,” Spooks suggested, trying to stop the Marine from drinking any more of the water.

  But it was useless. The guy was adamant. Thirst had gotten the better of him. And the longer we stood there, staring at the waterfall, the better it was going to get of the most of us. So I decided to act. I pulled out my scanner, and extended the antenna.

  The scanner consisted of a box -shaped object, with an LCD screen on it. The scanner was used to, well… scan the environment. It could scan both organic and atmospheric materials. So what I did was approach the water cautiously, kneeling down beside the craggy rocks that surrounded the bank of the river, a little way away from both the waterfall and the thirst quenching Marine. I bent down and stuck the antenna into the water for a few seconds, waiting for the little box in my hand to blink a red or green light. Generally speaking, the scanner would either go red when there was some sort of danger of infection or other untoward situations that we needed to be aware of, or it would go green when there was no immediate threat. The scanner was capable of analysing up to 27,000 different particles every millisecond, and pinpoint threats that were exclusively dangerous to human beings.

  By now, I had an audience. Some of my fellow Marines had gathered around me, impatiently waiting for the scanner to blink red or green. I suppose if it blinked green, they would be ripping their helmets off to take a sip of the precious water flowing around us. But unfortunately, the scanner didn’t go green. It went red. Seven times. I’d never seen the scanner react so violently before. There was something in the water. Something bad. I stumbled backwards, a little terrified of what may be lurking in there. I didn’t want to get my suit wet. Not if there were flesh eating parasites of some sort. Obviously, that’s where my mind went first. Secondly, it went to sea monsters.

  I guess you can’t take the boy out of a Marine. I remember when I was smaller, monsters were the scariest thing to me. Sea monsters were probably the scariest. I remembered reading Moby Dick, a book from a long time ago, before men could even drive cars, let alone spaceships. I remember reading that book and thinking how absolutely brave the fisherman was. Confronting such a monster could only mean he was brave. Well, it could mean he was stupid as well. As you would have to be stupid to go hunting for a giant sea monster.

  And quite frankly, you’d have to be just as stupid to take off your space grade helmet on an alien planet to take mouthfuls of water from a spring that you had no idea whether it was safe to drink from. Moby Dick was no sea monster really. He was a whale. So maybe that was a bad analogy. But then again, I consider most ten-ton sea animals to be monsters.

  “Why is it beeping so much?” Somebody asked beside me.

  I turned toward him, and shrugged my shoulders. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking through me. I frowned. And then noticed that everybody was staring in the same direction. It was as if something was behind me. So I slowly turned around, and saw what all the fuss was about. Spooks had his railgun aimed directly at the Marine that had been drinking from the spring. At first, my gut was telling me to tell Spooks to lower his weapon. A Marine doesn’t kill one of his own. But then I saw that he wasn’t aiming his gun at no Marine, at least, no Marine that I knew.

  We all gasped in horror as the man that had been drinking from the waterfall started convulsing. A gunky substance was leaking from his eyeballs as he twitched his head back and forth, water oozing out of every pore of his skin. Something was definitely in the water. And it was causing this man's sudden and violent demise.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, gripping my railgun tightly, about to raise it toward the convulsing Marine a few feet from me on the embankment.

  But before I could even get a clear shot at him, Spooks had discharged his firearm. It made me and the few Marines behind me jump. It had come out of the blue. As out of the blue as the thirsty Marines transformation. For he didn’t look human anymore. What looked like tentacles sprouting out of his chest ripped at the spacesuit that he was wearing. But Spooks’ gunfire did nothing. And the Marine began to grow into some sort of hideous monster. He was no longer human. I didn’t know what he was. But I knew that he had to die. If he wasn’t dead already that is.

  “Open fire!” I said, unloading a clip into the tentacle-sprouting Marine. And as I did so, the rest of the men around me did the same, lighting the former Marine up with gunfire.

  Spooks was backpedalling toward us. I made sure not to wing him with my railgun fire. As Spooks reached me, he knelt down and reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out his own scanner. This scanner was a little more advanced than mine. It had a larger screen and a camera on it. Spooks quickly snapped a picture of the Marine as he stumbled about, roaring like the beast before, an animalistic-predatory-evolution taking place in front of us. He was transforming before our very eyes. And something was telling me that we had to stop his transformation if we were to survive.

  So I reached into my holster and pulled out a grenade. I’d got a spare one off a corpse on the ground earlier. It was a Semtex grenade. It stuck to surfaces. Unlike normal grenades that bounced upon impact, this grenade would stick to anything that it came in contact with. So without thinking, I armed it and flung it at the monstrous sight in front of us. It hit the Marine in the belly. One of the tentacles that were protruding through his stomach tried to swat at the grenade, but it was no use. The grenade went off, and we all hit the dirt, covering ourselves.

  “Oooo-rah!” Somebody had shouted before the dust settled.

  I raised my head slightly to get a better look at the aftermath of the Semtex grenade. My stomach churned at the carnage that was centimetres away from my face. There wasn’t much left of the Marine or his tentacles. Whatever had caused the Marine to transform in front of us was dead. And so was he. Bits and pieces of him were scattered on the floor. Most of him had fallen into the water. A huge streak of blood was washing downstream. My head craned as I followed the bloodstain. The smear disappeared through some rocks. And before I knew it, the water looked clean once again. But the embankment was littered with tiny bits of flesh, blood and bone.

  “Jesus Christ, there’s nothing left of him,” I said, standing up. I noticed that some blood splatter had found its way onto my helmet. I gently wiped it with the back of my glove, unintentionally smearing my vision a little.

  “The water isn’t safe to drink,” somebody said behind me.

  I turned around expecting to see a Marine standing right in front of me. But I was met with no
thing but air. I looked down at my boots and saw the native standing and staring up at me. It had a weird smile on its face. Like it had enjoyed watching one of our men being torn apart from the inside. I felt a sudden flash of anger rush through me. My ears felt like hot coals, and I swear that steam must have been coming out of them, because the inside of my helmet began to fog up. My fists clenched and I was about to whack the native in the face, but Spooks stepped in between us. He gave me a look and I nodded, looking down at the ground, kicking some mud off my boots. He didn’t need to say anything. I understood everything that the previous nod of his head had entailed.

  “Thanks for the heads up,” Spooks said, staring daggers at the native.

  The little bulbous creature changed its smug expression on its insect-like face and scurried back to the back of the line. It hid gingerly behind one of the taller Marines. I shook my head and turned to Spooks.

  “You should have let me sock it right in the fucking face. Did you see how smug he looked? He enjoyed that. He enjoyed seeing one of our men die! I thought we were supposed to be on the same side here? Fuck that little shit,” I said, wiping my visor again, trying to clear the smudge on the glass. Spooks didn’t say anything, he just pointed in the direction we’d came from and ushered us to follow him. We did as he asked and started moving.

  “Why do you think he took a picture of that thing?” Somebody asked beside me, but I couldn’t find the words to answer him. My mind was racing.

  “Shouldn’t we get his tags?” The guy asked, still sidled up beside me, still asking questions. I stopped in my tracks and turned toward him.