“I don’t like this,” Vaughn said.
“Stating the obvious,” Samantha shot back, mimicking his tone.
Neither sounded scared, but Skyler knew Sam well enough to hear the concern in her voice. Nothing fazed her, but when facing potential danger, the one thing she liked least was wielding unfamiliar kit. The armored space suits they wore, with their built-in alien weaponry, were still uncomfortably new. She and Vaughn had spent a lot more time than him practicing with them in one of the ship’s biomes, albeit with minimal live fire. Eve wouldn’t allow more within her hull. Skyler had spent all of thirty minutes himself, trying the fit, too weirded out by the skintight feel to stay a moment longer. His military past in the Dutch air force had ingrained in him a fierce need to test and retest gear constantly, a practice he suddenly regretted letting slip from habit.
He weighed his options. Too many unknowns, save one simple fact: their goal. “We’ll take a sample of this thing. Doesn’t look the same, fine, but who knows? Maybe it grows that rough bark once it’s out in the vacuum. A defense mechanism or something, to survive in space.”
“Which it reaches, how, exactly?” Sam asked. “The fuckers are rooted down here.”
“Maybe something throws them,” Vaughn offered, half-serious.
Skyler doubted that. They hadn’t seen anything here that could pick up one of the giant seedpods and throw it upward with a force so great it would reach orbit, much less drift off into interstellar space. But he held back the opinion, unwilling to discourage ideas just yet.
Instead he turned and moved to the base of the huge object—plant or animal, he had no idea. He hopped up onto the tangle of roots, each as big around as his thigh, climbing until he stood next to the skin of the body. It glistened slightly in the weak light of this planet’s meager red dwarf sun.
He reached behind his back and tapped a small area at the base of his spine. A pocket of sorts, which inflated like a balloon at his touch before its two sections separated like eyelids. Inside the concealed pouch was a thin sheet of semitransparent material, almost milky in appearance. Though he hadn’t spent a lot of time practicing tactical movement in the space suit, he had practiced this. The mission relied on it.
“Hurry it up, Sky,” Sam said. “Going from bad to worse up there.”
He fought the urge to look. Holding the sheet with both hands, he positioned it at a slight angle to the surface of the pod, coming up at it from below. When the edge of the sheet touched the creature’s flesh a thin layer began to peel away. Good enough. Skyler angled the edge of the sheet outward as he continued to push upward, cutting off a neat, razor-thin sample that looked like expertly sliced garlic. He folded the sheet in half, and when its edges touched, the entire perimeter self-sealed and bled out any air trapped inside, leaving him holding a small, packaged sample.
“Sky!” Sam urged. “Now would be good.”
“Done,” he said, slipping the sample back into the pouch at the small of his back. He felt the suit reshape itself around it, returning to its original form more or less. He turned and hopped off the root, floating down the six meters to a tidy landing between Sam and Vaughn.
The pair were in half-crouched positions, arms held out, weapons ready. The suits were all outfitted identically, with a beam weapon on each arm, though Eve had warned that using both simultaneously would tax the suit’s power source. Vaughn and Sam had something extra, though: a mortar launcher that resembled an elongated bulb on their backs, poking up slightly over the right shoulder. Skyler noticed neither of his companions had extended theirs. Probably because they’d been unable to test the ordnance on board the ship.
On the ridge, the boulder closest to them suddenly lurched upward and toppled back. Creatures flowed out from beneath. Like scabby black beetles the size of small ground cars, running on stubby legs that ended in sharp spikes.
“Fucking hell,” Vaughn muttered.
“I’m not keen to start blasting the locals,” Sam said.
Skyler moved back a step. “Agreed. Let’s try the—”
He’d been turning as he spoke, to face the opposite slope of the valley. But an identical eruption of life had occurred there, too. A dozen of the scarab-things scurried from below a rock that toppled backward as they came forth.
Skyler glanced to his right, up the valley. It ended where the two ridges met, about half a kilometer away and just as high. To his left, the valley ran in a crooked line for a kilometer or so before emptying out into a vast flat floodplain that stretched to the not-so-distant horizon. “That way,” he said, and began moving in the awkward hopping run the low gravity allowed. Samantha quickly overtook him, naturally taking point. Vaughn, he knew, would be falling in behind. Such a team they made.
Weaving between the root-ball formations that held the giant space clams upright, Skyler spoke into the comm. “Locals have appeared, and they don’t seem too friendly. Streams of them coming down from the ridges. I think we woke them up, somehow.”
“We see them,” Tania said. “What are you going to do?”
“Move out onto the floodplain and hope they don’t follow.” He knew as soon as he said it that some kind of endgame was required. “Can you move the Elevator out there and pick us up? I’m not thrilled with the idea of trying to backtrack.”
A pause as Tania no doubt consulted with the AI that ran the ship. Or was the ship. He still wasn’t quite clear on that.
“We’ll move the space elevator,” Tania said. “Vanessa, stay on the climber and hold on.”
“Copy that,” she replied.
The presence of a goal gave Skyler renewed focus. He had the sample, and even though it was from what appeared to be the wrong animal, and a flood of death scarabs was bearing down from all around him, at least they had an exit strategy.
“Holy hell there’s a lot of them,” Vaughn said through labored breaths.
Skyler chanced a look to one side. Boulders all along the ridge were shaking, toppling, or already fallen, and from each a pack of the black scarabs raced out and down, leaving little puncture marks where their spike-tipped legs churned the fungus and sand. The creatures had no antennae or even eyes, at least that Skyler could see. Who knew what sort of sensory organs they would have developed, though. Not the time to find out.
He ran on, following the path Sam took more or less, occasionally darting around one of the massive upright pods where she went up and over. Some were only six or seven meters tall. Immature, maybe, compared with the largest that soared a hundred meters or more above. The farther into the valley the more their presence felt like a forest.
Then he saw the flat plain spread out before him, its muted surface alive with the shifting light filtering down through the thick cloud layer. Tans and reds and dark patches of mud. It may have once been the bed of a great ocean.
“Skyler,” Vanessa said.
“I’m clear of the pods. What’s your status?”
“Right above you. Skyler, look back.”
He’d fallen into a natural gait of long, loping strides. At Vanessa’s request he propelled himself upward in a high arc on the next step, and in midair he turned around to look behind. Vaughn had just cleared the forest of space clams. Behind him, two waves of black scarabs crashed down from the steep valley walls. He’d expected them to give chase. To turn and follow them at least some distance out into the open wastes. Or, barring that, he figured they would crash into the upright forms of the pods. But they did neither of these things. Instead, the flood of stubby legs and carapaces hit the behemoth structures and started to climb. They spiraled up, clambering over one another with reckless abandon. Many fell away in the chaos. But most ended their climb by simply driving their spiked legs into the flesh of the giant pods and pressing themselves down onto the surface like hungry leeches. As more and more of the creatures climbed, the smooth beige skin of each pod transformed into something scaly, rough, and very black.
“Just like the one Eve showed us,” Skyler mutt
ered, mostly to himself.
“Exactly,” Vanessa replied.
He landed and stopped, transfixed. Sam soon came to stand next to him, and Vaughn a few seconds after her. The three of them stood, side by side, watching in silence as the scarabs performed their bizarre ballet.
“I still don’t understand how they get—”
Sam’s words were cut off by the sudden erratic motion of one of the largest pods. The giant stood nearly two hundred meters tall, and it had begun to wobble back and forth. Due to its own movement, or being rocked by the flood of creatures that surrounded it, Skyler couldn’t tell.
Plumes of gas erupted from around the base of the pod, spraying outward with astonishing force. Scarabs, their stubby legs flailing, were thrown in every direction. But not those that had reached and climbed the towering pod. Despite their swaying host and the eruption from below, the animals held fast.
A great tearing sound signaled the moment the root-ball let go. The giant began to lift toward the sky on a plume of rapidly expanding gases. Scarabs near its tip that hadn’t found a place to attach fell away as the great creature gained speed and altitude.
Utterly captivated, Skyler and his companions watched as the animal or plant or whatever it was flew ever higher. More joined it, and soon dozens were lifting up toward the thick cloud layer and beyond.
“Tania, are you seeing this?”
“I am,” she replied from Eve’s position high above, in geosynchronous orbit. “And I think I know what we need to do.”
Kepler-186f
11.JUNE.3202 (Earth Actual)
A COUPLE DAYS later, Samantha stood atop a boulder one hundred meters from the base of the four space elevators, her eyes scanning the horizon. Then, she looked straight up. “Status?” she asked.
“You should see us any second now,” Tania replied.
She studied the clouds where the four thin elevator cords vanished. Bands of purple and orange, sliding past like some kind of contaminated river in the sky. A minute passed. Sam took one more glance across the horizon. Nothing moved. In this valley, sixty kilometers from the first one they’d visited two days prior, the clams stood like silent, fat, gigantic almonds, utterly dormant. She turned her eyes back to the clouds. A faint shape had formed now, growing more pronounced with each passing second. “Got you. How long until touchdown?”
“Seven minutes,” Tania replied.
A long time to stand around on a hostile world full of unknown dangers. “Can’t Eve pop the ship into one of those purple bubbles and speed this up?” Sam despised the tech. It made her feel off. It flirted a little too much with being magic, a trait only hammered home when even Tania admitted she couldn’t understand Eve’s explanation of how it worked. How the Builders managed to do it would, for now at least, remain a mystery, and although Sam had no complaints about the usefulness of a slowed pocket of time—it’s why they’d gotten here in months despite the centuries that had passed since leaving Earth—she had no desire to be inside one by choice. At least here she was well away from the ship.
“The bubbles only change time on the inside, Sam,” Prumble noted. “It would only go faster for us.”
“Oh. Right. I knew that.”
Sam resisted the temptation to watch the ship come down the elevators, forcing herself instead to focus on the landscape around her. The valley was much larger than the first one they’d explored. Over a thousand of the upright pods lined its floor, in what she assumed were varying states of maturity. Some were just a few meters tall and very pale in coloration, others approaching one hundred meters with that darker, almondlike skin. All would soon be dwarfed by the gigantic form of their ship, the Chameleon.
“Chameleon,” she whispered. Finally, a name with a nice ring to it. Prumble’s idea, of course, and a name Eve’s drastically reconfigured hull still had to earn. Once on the ground, the ship would tower over the other stalks. Sam shook her head. “I hope those scarab creatures are stupid fucks, because this already looks ridiculous.”
“It’s the best plan we have, Sam,” Skyler said.
“Yeah, well, it’s like a mature croc trying to hide among turtles.”
“Playing the cards we’re dealt, et cetera. Stay focused.”
She sighed, waved at Vaughn. He waved back, then did a little dance atop his own lookout boulder. Sam stifled a laugh.
If it weren’t for Vaughn she doubted she’d have come on this mission. Helping the fucking Builders. Jesus. Sometimes it felt like she’d agreed to help a lost child find his parents after that lost child had just murdered everyone else. Literally everyone else. It took some twisted logic to justify all this. She tried to push away her next thought before it formed, but it still came: This better be worth it.
“What are you thinking about over there?” Vaughn asked on their private channel.
“Guess.”
“ ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ ”
She laughed. “Nailed it, mate.”
“Something to tell the grandkids about, though, isn’t it?”
“Grandkids implies kids, love. Planning to breed? Got a partner in mind?” Once again her rebuke came across playful. Telling the man outright to back off a little, to give her some room to breathe, never quite worked. Sam had only herself to blame. She wanted her space, and yet she dreaded the idea of being alone out here, facing all this.
“Ten seconds,” Tania said in her ear.
The words brought on a sudden adrenaline rush. The moment she lived for, that instant before the battle began, when plans could finally be set aside—and thank you very much—in favor of cold instinct and hardened nerves. Jake, the crew’s sniper back on Earth, rest his soul, had understood this feeling. Vaughn understood it, too.
Here we go.
Tania’s next words sent another ripple of anticipation up her spine. “The Chameleon has landed.”
Sam glanced at the landing site, and up the flanks of Eve’s highly modified and reshaped hull. To the AI’s credit, the surfaces really did resemble the silent creatures lining the valley floor, their molecular structures based on the skin sample Skyler had taken two days before. A pretty damn convincing trick, even if the size was way off. The Chameleon looked the part. Just ten times bigger. It hadn’t made so much as a sound to signal its arrival.
“Right,” Sam said. “Vaughn?”
“Say the word, Grandma,” he replied.
“Don’t be a shit. Commence operation light-’em-up. On my mark.” She convinced her suit to deploy the mortar tube. “Mark.”
Sam jumped straight up, giving her a better view of the surrounding ridges and the vast plains beyond. Through her helmet she marked off a half-circle, five hundred meters out, and gave the mental order. Fire for effect, even spread.
The launcher on her back came to life. It felt like someone repeatedly pushing down hard on her shoulders as the projectiles took flight. Behind her, Vaughn executed a similar maneuver, targeting the western direction.
Grandma. She sighed inwardly. She’d have to have the talk with him again. Not the time or place to start a serious relationship, she’d say again, and he’d agree and promise to dial back the flirtatious banter with total sincerity. She’d laugh then, a betrayal of nerve, and he’d think the conversation was some joke. Then they’d wind up rolling around on the bed for an hour or three and she’d be right back where she started. Front and center in the old battle between love and independence.
As Sam fell back to the ground a series of explosions flashed across her view from north to south. Fireballs and thrown debris, followed by roiling clouds of inky black smoke. “Well, now we know the mortars work. The trap is set, Skyler.”
“Understood. Get to the base.”
She landed in the muck a few meters from her boulder, turned, and began the awkward series of hops that served as a sprint on this world. Facing west now she saw the towering form of Chameleon, and the pillars of black smoke rising up to either side beyond the steep valley walls. Those
mortars packed a hell of a punch. She grinned.
“Movement,” a voice said. “Scarabs, emerging from both ridges.” It was Tim, at Tania’s side aboard the ship.
“Looks like it worked,” Tania added.
The ground shook. Samantha glanced behind her in time to see the boulder she’d been standing on moments earlier begin to tilt to one side. Moist soil fell away from it in clumps. Then with a meaty thud the rock toppled over to one side and swarms of black-shelled animals began to emerge as if expelled from some great pressure below. At first they erupted in a rough circle, but in less than a second they had her marked as a threat and began to flow in her direction, running on their stubby legs.
“Here come the little bastards,” Sam said. “Vaughn!”
“I see ’em,” he replied.
Skyler spoke up, his voice calm in her ear. “Focus on the ship. Remember we need these creatures.”
“We know the drill, Sky,” said Sam. “Vaughn? Race you to the top.”
“You’re on,” he replied.
On Sam’s next landing she pointed herself forward rather than up and pushed off hard, propelling herself at a shallow angle toward the tail of the Chameleon. So low an angle, in fact, that she found she could execute an almost cartoonish run. She gained more speed than intended, and threw her arms out in front of her just before slamming into the smooth skin that now served as the ship’s hull. Her armor took the impact in stride. Sam staggered back a step, feeling more than seeing the approaching horde of scrabbling monsters all around her. Ten meters away and closing fast. Cutting it thin. Sam jumped upward with all her strength, hands outstretched. She’d practiced this next part in the biome several times over the last day, but now, being chased by a frenzied mob, she felt her confidence falter. If only they’d had time to design some thrusters for the suit.
A meter from the hull she felt her outstretched hands tugged gently toward the faux surface. Her palms hit the ship’s hull and stuck, drawn by magnetism. Not hard, just enough to keep her stuck there, but still able to disengage and propel herself higher. She did so.
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