by Randy Noble
Chapter 30
An hour later, a small, blue planet loomed. Rachel throttled down, the mystery team below already informed of their arrival.
The planet was a small one, more like a moon. From their distance, you could tell it consisted mostly of water, except for a gray haziness that Rachel assumed was cloud cover.
“Take it easy,” Blair said, not without some nervousness in his voice. “Jesus!”
“Relax.” Rachel throttled right down, stopping three hundred thousand kilometers from the planet, which she pretty much called The Planet, since nobody seemed to have a name for it. Death might be a more fitting name for it.
“Why’d you stop? Our passengers won’t like it.”
“Are they going to come up and yell at me?” Rachel looked over at Blair, batted her eyes a few times, and then looked away. “I’m the pilot, and I’m in charge on this ship. Besides, I’m not going in to a piss pot of mines and killing all of us.”
“Sorry.”
Rachel looked over at Blair, surprised it might be a genuine apology. “Wow, Blair, I didn’t think that word was in your vocabulary.”
Before he had a chance to say anything, she opened up ship’s communications.
Blair closed his half-opened mouth.
“Hello mystery passengers. I’ve stopped a few hundred thousand kilometers away. I’ll get us there soon enough, but when I get closer, I will slow right down as I maneuver around the mines. If one even flinches at me, I will bail, and this mission is over. As you were informed before, or should have been, I am in complete command while you are on this ship. I’ll leave the channel open so you’re aware of our progress.”
The same deep voice as before, unless they all talked like that, said, “Thank you, pilot.”
Rachel moved the throttle up, and, five minutes later, they were very close to the planet, the haziness revealed as thousands of mines. “That’s more than ten thousand, just from what we can see, Blair.”
“Wow! That’s amazing. They weren’t messing around.”
“Watch them, Blair. Let me know if any move.”
The space before them was littered with gray, round mines, six feet in diameter. Little cylinders covered their surface, which Rachel assumed were little rockets to move in any direction as quickly as possible. Or maybe some of them were sensors. She throttled down, coasting now.
“I guess we’ll find out if your cloak is see-through or not.” Rachel smiled. Blair did not.
“Computer,” Rachel said, “go proximity active to . . .” There was so little space between any of them. “. . . to ten feet, alarm only, full stop at five feet. Acknowledge, voice authority, Rachel Winslow.”
“Acknowledge,” said the tinny, female computer voice of the shuttle. “Proximity active as requested.”
“I think you’re going too fast,” Blair said.
She smiled at him. “Going as slow as I can go.” She slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, I’ve used these proximity controls before. The ship will stop if we get too close. What scares me is if one moves on us, we probably won’t have enough time to bolt.”
Blair started bopping his right leg up and down. “Gee, thanks. You’re so reassuring and comforting.”
Rachel spoke every word slowly and distinctly. “You are welcome.” She looked over at Blair for a second, staring.
“What?” Blair said. “What the hell are you looking at me for?”
Rachel throttled right down and stopped again, just before they reached the mass of mines.
“Look, Blair, the windows in these shuttles suck. These ships are probably almost always on autopilot along the grid, but I won’t be able to see shit, and the proximity controls will be stopping us every two seconds. We’ll have to abort mission, because it will take too long.”
“What do you want me to do about it, go outside and point to them?”
“I don’t suppose that camera outside can be linked to my monitor, can it?”
Blair nodded. “Actually, it can.”
A minute later, Rachel was looking at the mines on her monitor.
“I tilted the view so it’s a 180 degree view forward,” Blair said.
“That is perfect. Thank you.” And she meant it. The first un-obnoxious thing he had done.
Rachel throttled up one notch, as slow as she could go. “Honestly, I think if the mines could detect us, it would have happened by now. I think we’ll be okay.”
Blair breathed out heavily.
Rachel flew for the biggest opening she could see, which was a hole about twenty feet between mines, and then it got worse. She flew using the monitor as a guide.
As well as she flew, there was no way to avoid getting closer. The proximity alarm went off.
Blair started bopping his right leg up and down again.
The alarm was faint, just as a warning. Five seconds after it began, it shut off, and two seconds after that, it began again for a few seconds. This continued as Rachel made her way through what seemed an endless amount of mines. The mines must have been two thousand feet deep, but she flew through them with no problem. The proximity got to five feet a couple times and they were stopped automatically, but she got going again, getting through, and continued on.
Twenty minutes later, they were through, just above the ionosphere. “We’re through,” Rachel said out loud so the crew below would know. “I’m going to orbit until we find a land mass we can tube down to.”
A deep voice returned over the speaker. “Thank you.”
“Blair, find me some land on the monitor in front of you, as I orbit.”
Five minutes later, Blair found a sizeable chunk of land. “I got it,” Blair said. “This place has to be at least eighty five percent water. I think this might be the only land mass on the whole planet.”
“Lock it in over a low point, center mass.”
Blair polled for topography on the center of the land mass and found what he was looking for. “Done,” Blair said. “Open field, with trees on one side, mountains in the near distance.”
Rachel disabled the proximity control and set the computer to synchronize orbit over the coordinates that Blair locked in.
“All right boys, and possibly girls,” Rachel said, “we are locked in and you are good to go. Repeat, you are good to go. Mission time is at one hour and fifty minutes. I’m estimating we’ll need two hours to get back safely. That gives you all two hours and ten minutes to get your asses back on this ship. I leave, regardless, after that time has elapsed.”
“Understood,” came the same deep voice over the speaker.
Chapter 31
“So, explain this to me again, because I’m curious.” Rachel batted her eyes at Blair and he flushed red.
“Ahhh, okay. It works on electrical current. Depending on the amount and type of current, the flow will change in the tube.”
“Yeah, but what is the actual tube?”
“I can’t tell you that. But for argument’s sake, it’s basically a very dense, semi-solid substance, which reacts to electricity. It can go several hundred kilometers without losing viscosity. It’s really quite incredible. There’s nothing else like it, and it’s only affected by internal electricity, so the atmosphere, especially the electrically charged ionosphere, will not affect it. All you need to do is suit up and jump in, and it will take you at an electrically controlled speed to the ground.”
“What about falling out? And where does it go when it hits the ground?”
Blair smiled, proud of his supposed invention. Rachel assumed it to be the work of many people.
“They can’t fall out. The answer to your second question will prove this. The amount of current not only sets speed, but also distance. The video explained this to the crew going down. The tube device can gauge distance to target and set electrical flow accordingly. Just before the ground target, the flow will come back around and over itself, in a circular motion. It never quite hits the ground, hovering about four feet above so the travel
er can get out. The flow down takes the traveler down, and the flow coming back up -- a thinner layer, mind you -- acts as a barrier that cannot be penetrated. And, before you ask, it is reversed to bring them back; it just means the flow is going the other way.”
Rachel got the gist of it, but Blair felt the need to explain further. “That is, the outer flow goes down towards the planet, and the inner flow goes up towards the ship. The only intervention I have to make is reversing the flow after the crew has gone down to the planet, so they can get back up.”
It baffled Rachel how it could possibly work, but she took his word for it, happy enough to have a general understanding. Blair was arrogant, but he did know what he was talking about. “So even though it starts out as the little tube we put into the hole in the ship, it spreads out, keeping the same thickness.”
“Yep. Very dense material, yet very light. It has a consistency near water when flowing, but a little thicker. You would not survive it without a suit.”
As Blair spoke, Rachel watched on her screen, linked to Blair’s camera on top of the ship, as the tube descended through the atmosphere and down to the planet. Seconds later, a dark shape appeared in the green substance.
Blair also watched. “It looks like the first one is on their way.”
“I’m assuming,” Rachel said, “that we can’t fly down to the surface on the risk that the descent through the atmosphere would fuck up our little invisibility cloak.”
Blair sniffed. “Correct you are. It would destroy it, in fact, and we would never get back through the mines.”
Ten minutes later, after the crew had tubed down to the planet, and after Blair switched the flow of the tube so the crew could get back, they waited, and speculated, or at least Rachel did. She assumed Blair did, too.
Rachel pondered what she and Blair talked about previously. Alien life? Could it be? Why so hostile? Why would they kill anyone who comes to their planet? Do they think of us as we think of a bug, or do they have something to hide? And what makes us think we can get away with what nobody on the Theseus got away with? She had so many questions, probably none of which would get answered, except the whole do-they-get-away-with-it situation. She wondered whether she would have taken the job, knowing the history of it all. And, if the planet doesn’t kill her, will the ones who set it all up?
Rachel blankly let things run through her head, and then, after forty-four minutes, everything went to hell.
Chapter 32
Blair stared at the screen. “There is somebody coming back up. That was fast.”
Rachel immediately got a bad feeling. It was fast. Too fast. They wouldn’t come back this early. Yet, there it was, a shadowy figure moving up the tube to the ship.
They both waited, saying nothing, just watching the screen. No other shadows appeared in the tube.
“I think we should go down there,” Rachel said.
“No. We can’t. You know we can’t.”
“My ship, my rules. It’s a need to know thing. I need to know the situation, because I’m not hanging around if this ship is in danger.”
Rachel got up.
“No!” Blair said, but remained seated.
“Blair, we don’t know if what came back up was human. Do you want to wait around and find out?”
Blair got up, slowly. “Fine, but you’re going first.”
Rachel made her way through the cockpit hatch, and looked toward the back of the passenger area at the engine room door. Closed.
As she approached the engine room door, she listened for any sort of sound, hearing nothing. Her palms sweated, and she could feel her heart beating in her chest. She forced out a whoosh of air, not realizing she had been holding her breath until just then. She concentrated on taking deep breaths.
Blair crept ten feet behind her.
She put her ear to the door.
Blair stopped, five feet back. “D-do you hear anything?”
“No. Nothing. Fuck.” Rachel tapped in the door’s electronic keypad code. A red-lighted lock symbol on the keypad turned to a green unlocked symbol.
She slowly turned the knob, trying not to make any noise.
A shuffling noise came from the other side of the door. Or, at least she thought she heard something. She turned and mouthed the words “Did you hear that?” to Blair.
Blair shook his head.
Her hands were so sweaty, the doorknob slippery. Almost there. She closed her eyes, putting all her concentration on the knob not slipping from her grasp and making a noise, alerting who -- or what -- on the other side.
A moan, only a whimper of a moan, came from the other side of the door.
The doorknob made its journey, her grip precariously close to being lost.
Rachel looked at Blair with questioning eyes. He nodded. She took that as an acknowledgement of the moan she heard.
She took a deep breath, held it, and quickly went into the room. In hindsight, not a great idea, being as she had nothing to protect herself with. But it was done.
The three cylinders loomed above, and below that, half in and half out of the tube, was a man in a skintight space suit, with a form fitting see-through helmet. He wore a pair of glasses on his face. Two tanks adorned his back, fitted like a backpack. He was not moving.
Rachel ran up to him, Blair in tow and in no hurry.
She took off his tanks and rolled him over, revealing a still breathing man, with two bloody wounds in his stomach. Were they bullet wounds?
What the fuck! she thought.
The man moaned in pain.
Rachel got his head gear off.
“What happened?” Rachel said. “Where are the others?”
“D-dead,” the man said in a weak, deep voice.
Rachel wondered for a second if they all went crazy. “Who the hell shot you?”
“R-run.” The man grabbed Rachel, pulling her closer to his face so they were only a foot apart. “Run for your life!” He said this as loudly as he could muster, which was barely above a whisper.
And then he died, his head lulling to one side.
Blair watched, astonished, standing just above them both. “Jesus!”
“We’re leaving,” Rachel said, standing up and immediately walking towards the door.
“We can’t. We have an obligation here, to wait for the rest.”
“You heard him, Blair. He said they are dead. I, for one, do not want to find out how.” She stopped and turned to him. “Look, you’re scared, and so am I. Take a breath and think clearly. We stay, we die. Remember the Theseus. Nobody survived it, including those that never went to the surface. Someone would have remained behind while the others went to the surface, and nobody survived. We’re leaving. Now.”
Blair looked at the body and bent down and dragged him out of the tube, with some effort, because he was a large, muscular man. He then turned the power off to the tube. Whether alive or dead, nobody was coming back off of the planet surface.
Chapter 33
Rachel wasted no time when she got back into her pilot’s chair. “Computer,” she said, “go proximity active to three feet, alarm only. Acknowledge, voice authority, Rachel Winslow.”
“Jesus! That’s fucking suicide.”
“Acknowledge,” came the tinny, female voice of the computer. “Proximity active as requested.”
“Rachel!”
Rachel throttled up, much more quickly than when they were coming through the mines.
Blair’s face beaded with sweat. His eyes looked ready to pop out of his head. “We won’t have enough time to maneuver if the alarm goes off. What if we hit one?”
Rachel weaved between the mines, using the screen as guidance. Without looking at Blair, she said, “You are my eyes, Blair. That alarm goes off, I need to know where it is. Yell out a direction. Left, right, below, above, front, back, I don’t care. Just let me know where it is. Got it?”
“But --”
“Got it?” she said, louder.
“I got it.�
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Rachel flew with grace, left, then right, down, up, flying an obstacle course of mines.
“Jesus, Rachel, what did you do before this? Fly for a stunt show or fly get-a-ways for robberies?”
“Both,” she said, telling Blair what she had told no one, but she didn’t care. Blair would likely not take her response seriously anyway. Regardless, it was all her past now. No more.
The alarm went off, and to Blair’s credit, he did not freeze. He immediately yelled out. “Right!”
Rachel veered left, and then right again quickly to avoid another mine.
What took twenty minutes to come through the first time, took Rachel five minutes on the return. Once through, she set the coordinates for the return to Pyramid and accelerated full throttle.
With the ship on automatic pilot, she relaxed somewhat, breathed out heavily, and then stood up. “Okay, let’s go.”
“What? Go where?”
“First, we need to get rid of that body.”
Chapter 34
Blair and Rachel stood over the body of the soldier, or whatever he was. Rachel assumed he was a soldier. A defined, muscular body. The body of someone who works out every day. Regimented. Trained. Stoic. And dead from bullets, but that didn’t matter. Did she suspect the aliens had guns? No, but she did suspect either the soldiers went crazy, or they panicked. All the training in the world does not prepare you for something you’re not mentally prepared for. It only took one to panic and shoot this man.
Blair reached down, pulled the soldier’s glasses from his face, and plopped them in his jacket pocket.
Rachel looked at Blair, knowing already what it was, but asked anyway. “Recording?”
“Yes. It’s probably encrypted, but I’ll try and crack it so we can see what they saw.” Blair paused. “I don’t know what to say. Should we say something?”
“Probably, but they knew the risk. Let’s just vent him through the tube.”