by S. J. Smith
“I’ll eat after you get me the system’s report on our landing gear, you need to be doing your actual job, not just hobbies,” she responded, sounding exasperated. Juniper had to still herself to keep her eyes from wandering up to his handsome face, the starlight from the galaxies around them played games in his black hair and she needed to focus. He was very distracting.
“Fair enough,” he responded, shrugging slightly. “It’ll take me a couple minutes to get it together, don’t go anywhere,” his voice was playful as he headed out through a different door than the one he had slipped in through.
Bren had been hired for the same reason as their third shipmate, they were both cyborgs, people who had seen tragedy and through science and training had become so much more. They literally owed their lives to HSOC (The Humanity Survival Outreach Corps) who funded their recoveries: which is actually how they ended up on the good old Marianne Zoendy, covering 90% of the jobs that used to be handled by 100 people.
Their job was to ensure Juniper could carry out her mission of exploration to find new planets to colonize without getting in the way or impeding her. Bren had been a water farmer, his father owned a treatment plant. He didn’t know a single thing about space or landing gear before his accident. HSOC made sure that along with a new vascular system, and improved anatomy over all, that his brain was pumped with all that he needed to know about exploration. Two months in a lab and he had as much knowledge about this role as ‘the normal human’ Juniper had, and she’d been doing this for fifteen years- the only thing either of the boys was missing was the fire and passion she had.
You couldn’t replicate or spark that in a laboratory.
Juniper straightened the collar of her jacket, smoothing her hair and clothing as she heard movement in the next room, she didn’t want to be caught off guard again. He couldn't know that she viewed him as anything more than a coworker.
“I thought I’d cover both bases,” Bren said, smiling from ear to ear. In his left hand was a file screen that she could read the reports on, in his right hand was a bowl of soup and crackers on a plate, the spoon clinked as he bumped the door open with his hip.
Juniper stood to take the file screen, and let him set the dish down on a small table beside her. Her index finger’s nail clicked slightly as she slid it over the sleek surface, scrolling through the information to ensure that their landing would be safe. They’d never had an issue, but she wasn’t going to stake her life on the chance that they’d never have problems in the future.
The calculations looked good and she set the file screen down on the table, the numbers clearing out into a blank surface once the device didn’t detect any eyes on it.
Bren came back into the room, bringing out a bowl and dish of his own, Juniper looked up at him expectantly, her heart beat out her surprise that he’d do this. She needed to be more careful.
“As I said, you don’t have to sit alone,” he said genuinely.
*****
Pov was fully immersed into his work when Juniper returned to the control center. Literally. His wiring was extremely compatible with the ship, to the point that there were times Juniper would swear that he could pilot it with his thoughts. Wiring of the ship was hooked into his arms at the elbow so he could monitor everything that was going on with the ship in its current status while working on other projects as well. He was younger than her and Bren by a couple years, his skin smoother and warm with the glow of being in his late twenties. His hair was a dark natural red, curling slightly and brushed back away from sleek features and crisp cheekbones. His eyes were an incredible dark brown, almost as black as the vastness of space, as they scanned over the information on his screen.
“How much longer do we have?” Juniper asked, not bothering to sit.
“Just about an hour, you should go ahead and start suiting up,” he responded, glancing up at her with those endless eyes. “You could always change in here if you wanted,” he flirted, a short smile on his lips.
“Ha-ha, very funny,” Juniper said dryly, smiling only once his eyes were off her. She could feel her cheeks warm at the thought of it. He wasn’t terribly younger than her, and he was incredibly attractive, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to-
She needed to get suited up, and she had an hour, she didn’t have time to dawdle.
“Make an announcement when we’re ten minutes out,” she commanded.
“Aye Cap’n,” he teased again, typing something into the screen and not bothering to look back to her.
***
Her suit was skin tight to allow for mobility. Pouches on the hips, and a pack she carried on her back, were used to carry whatever supplies she needed or samples she found on the trip out onto the surface. The planet looked like a giant copper marble that was starting to patina in streaks and streams across its surface. Pov’s voice came in through her earpiece as she finished ensuring her suit and helmet were air-tight and sealed properly. She wasn’t going to start her oxygen converter until she was stepping out onto the surface.
As she came out into the hall from her quarters, she was greeted by an almost fully suited Bren. His face was perfectly framed by the collar of his suit, and through his open door she could see his helmet was still on its hook in his room.
“You should really wear that some time,” she said shortly as he followed her through the ship to the control room. “You may not need to breathe, but you can never be sure if there’s something else going on down there on the surface.” She had said this dozens of times, but he never listened to her. His lungs and a large part of his chest, stomach, and legs had been replaced after what he told her was a fire. He basically had the oxygen converter that was in her suit built into his lungs. That wouldn’t help him if debris came flying at him, or if the atmosphere was corrosive, but at least he was wearing gloves this time.
“I’ll be fine, I always am,” Bren confidently said as they entered the command room.
“Wouldn’t want to ruin that hair of his anyways,” Pov joked without missing a beat. “There’s a lot of water down there and signs of plant life, so be sure to bring a stun gun just in case. I’ve included on each of your handhelds a map of the terrain as clear as I could get but there are red storms going on, so the image isn’t that clear. We’ll be landing a few hundred miles from any of that activity though,” he turned to them, or more to Bren with a stern face.
“If you give me the usual ‘don’t let anything happen to her’ spiel again I might just have to get my helmet to muffle your voice,” Bren cut him off impatiently. Pov’s eyes clicked between the two explorers for just a moment before he shrugged and agreed, turning back to his screen.
“Go ahead and head down to the lock-room, we’ll be landing in five, good luck today,” he said, his eyes reflecting off the screen and meeting with Juniper’s for just a moment.
***
The plant life of the world was bizarrely bright and soft. The gravity wasn’t terribly unlike the artificial gravity of the ship, yet when she stepped onto what might have been grass or moss on earth it felt like she was stepping onto a very soft mattress. The terrain was a rusty colored pink and gold, the water almost green in soft contrast. Glancing skyward, she admired the two suns, one substantially closer- but because of the distance they looked comparable in size.
A perfect distance for heat, comparable gravity, the air didn’t matter - they could fix that with enclosed environments for living.
“I always feel like we’re Adam and Eve when we first step onto new worlds,” Bren said softly, his gaze trailing over the scenery before pausing for a moment on Juniper’s face. They held eye contact for a moment, something warm blossoming between them, before Juniper unloaded her pack. She gathered samples of the ground plants while Bren used his pack to analyze the soil and atmosphere of the planet. It was hard finding a bit of soil that wasn’t overtaken by the soft moss that covered the ground.
“Soil is extremely acidic, you could grow tomatoes here witho
ut even trying,” he observed, marking down his findings. He continued to talk about his findings before pausing to look up to see why Juniper was quiet. She was about three hundred feet away from him, leaning down and closely studying something. “What do you have there?” he asked, curiously heading over to her.
She seemed entranced, below her line of sight was something small and furry, rolling around in circles and figure eights. It didn’t have legs, but moved more like a clock that had a fluffy inchworm as one of its hands. Something didn’t seem right.
“June, get away from that!” Bren shouted suddenly, breaking into a run towards her. She looked up at him, a surprised look on her face for just a moment before the fuzzy thing wrapped around her arm and pulled her into the ground. She yelped in surprise, trying to grasp at anything to get a hold, but was pulled under, the fuzzy ground retracting above her. Bren was too slow to save her.
He plunged his hand in the hole after her but felt nothing.
“Fuck!” he said angrily and desperately, trying to claw his way into the ground to save her.
***
The inside of the planet’s crust was just as soft as the top layer had been, it squished around her, moving her through what felt like a huge furry straw that was actively being sucked on. When the space around her finally opened up, her eyes had to adjust to the faint golden glow. The room was spherical, the lining of her surroundings was a rust color with ribbons of teal coloring running randomly throughout it. Juniper slowly stood, surveying her surroundings with open curiosity.
The soft moss-type plant matter was a bit rougher in here, denser in texture. Juniper cut a few strands of it from the wall, loading them into her pouch for later research. She was able to keep her mind active with the research for what must have been twenty minutes before she started fully trying to find a way out. Her communication device in the suit didn’t seem to be working, when it searched for the ship or for Bren it could find neither. The aperture that she had slid into the room through was now closed, and she couldn’t see any other clear entry or exit points.
She wasn’t sure what the makeup of the matter was, but she did want out. She gripped the knife she had used to gather samples tightly in her right hand, double checking for where she came in. She smacked her knife into the wall, her hand a tight fist around it, and attempted to drag the knife downward. The plant life was thick and made pulling the knife down difficult, she put all of her weight into dragging it down but it was still just hardly moving. Once the slit she made was a foot long, she tried to part the plants with her hands, which proved difficult. She couldn’t see any space behind it and it was hardening and changing color quickly.
A noise behind her alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone. It was a soft whirring sound, like a cat’s purr but more smooth, accented by a short click or chirp every few seconds.
Juniper slowly turned around, steeling herself to stop from making any sudden moves or large gestures. Behind her was a rather round creature, pitch black in coloration and covered in short spikes. The moment Juniper looked at it, it became startled and scurried up onto the wall of the enclosure, its spikes worked as excellent grips to help it climb and move without much effort.
“Hello there,” Juniper said softly under her breath, not really greeting it but trying to downplay her surprise. The quills on its body rippled and it twittered a bit in its place. Juniper hunched herself down a bit closer to the ground to make herself seem smaller and less of a threat. “What the hell are you?”
***
Bren was screaming into his communication unit, running back to the ship as fast as his legs could take him.
“It fucking ATE HER- IT ATE HER,” he shouted, slamming the buttons of the pass code in order to open the containment door. He quickly decontaminated and then started rushing into the hall, almost knocking Pov down as he did.
“What was it?” Pov asked, securing his own helmet on, regardless of whether he needed it. His fingers methodically were ensuring his blast gun was properly charged and had the safety on. His stress and worry didn’t show on his face but his whole frame was rigid in a way that it never had been before. His feelings for Juniper were genuine and it killed him to think she could be lost- but he couldn't show it.
“There was a worm that looked like the same material as the plant matter that covers most of the ground that we’ve seen, she was studying it and it grabbed her and took her under,” Bren replied, trying to be succinct.
“She’s underground? How thick is the matter?” Pov was now walking back towards the containment door and Bren followed.
“I tried to claw at it and it didn’t work, it looks a lot less solid than it is,” he responded. As they stepped out onto the planet surface, Pov pulled something out of his own pack and started inputting information. “Do you think a bio-scanner would be able to get through all this matter? It’s alive too,” Bren argued, impatiently.
“I’m just checking heat signatures.” Pov started to walk, the device could only cover a range of fifty square feet. “This stuff is a lot cooler than the average human, it should make it clear where she is.”
“That’s a lot simpler than I thought it would be,” Bren admitted, glad Pov was there to actually focus. Bren’s heart was still beating so hard and he knew it wasn’t because if something happened to her he would have failed the mission, there was so much more to it.
As they walked the landscape changed greatly, what had been land that was mostly undisturbed was slowly replaced by upturned giant chunks of the planet. The soft moss of the ground showed itself to go at least twenty feet deep if the torn up portions of ground were any good estimate. The portions of the moss that were completely destroyed turned a deep blue and hardened considerably.
An emerald green river flowed less than half a mile away from where they were walking and they walked parallel to it, able to hear its roar well enough to use it as a guide to get back to the ship when they needed to. The two stars that lit the entire planet so warmly were now drifting closer to the horizon and the men’s desperation to find Juniper became even stronger. They had been walking for hours in almost a perfect loop.
“We need to eat something, I can head back and grab food packs and meet back with you, we’re useless if we don’t have the energy to keep going,” Bren said, he didn’t want to stop searching, he didn’t want to waste a moment, but he had to be logical about this in any way he could.
“Alright, I’ll be following this same arc, be sure to com me if you can’t find me,” Pov replied, glancing up at him for just a moment. “She’s going to be fine, we’ll find her,” he said, his voice didn’t make it clear if he was reassuring Bren or himself.
Bren left and Pov took a deep breath, steeling himself to relax. There was no way the last thing he said to her could have been some cold words sending her off on a mission to something as unimportant as studying new plants. He was furious at the thought of losing her because of idiocy like that. He sped his pace a bit, pushing himself, and then he saw it- a heat signature so similar to his own, moving closer to the spot he could see it was humanoid in shape and size, he began to run the twenty feet to get over the location.
“I’ve got a heat signature that matches her,” Pov exclaimed into his com, circling the location quickly, looking for any way that he could get down there. She looked like she was sitting down, there was a beanbag shaped heat signature down there also but he didn’t pay it much mind. Whipping out his blast gun, he stepped away from her location by about ten feet and aimed straight down.
*****
Bren had run as fast as his legs could carry him, he heard an explosion and he knew Pov had used the blast gun. He shouted into the com for coordinates while running towards the direction he thought the sound had come from. Why was he so useless? Why couldn’t he just have been like Pov and ignored food? He left at the most important moment and now Pov wasn’t answering his com either.
Pov could smell the hole in the planet before
he could see it. The moss, when it burned, had a smell not unlike burning rubber. The crater had turned a dark blue and was quickly hardening. Pov jumped down into it and the difference of pressure under his feet was like jumping from a water bed onto concrete.
***
Juniper had come to an understanding of sorts with the creature.
She kneeled to the ground, and then sat, and the spike ball climbed down from the wall and slowly began to approach her. It had four short legs that stayed close to the body and moved quickly, almost making the creature look like it was rolling to the untrained eye.
She slowly moved to her pocket and pulled out her document screen, quietly turning on the camera option. The creature got closer, studying her as she studied it, its quills bristled now and then curiously as if it were documenting the information it carefully gathered. She recorded these movements, and then turned her screen around to show the creature what she had done, wondering how it would react. It didn’t have a face to gage a reaction from, but the way it bushed out quickly let her know it was surprised or scared of the video.
It slowly got closer to her, and she allowed it to, until it was almost directly in front of her face. Without it having eyes, she wasn’t sure where to look, so she focused on the most central quills that seemed to react to her.
Quickly, looking like it had hardly moved, it stuck a quill through the glass front of Junipers’s helmet.
Now she panicked.
The air on this planet would kill her within minutes, she had no doubt of this, and this pin cushion just put a hole in her defense against it. She jumped back a bit and the creature quickly retracted the quill back into itself, scurrying up and away from her to the ceiling where another aperture opened and let it through.
Juniper hurried to seal the hole in her helmet, panicked and terrified. Holding a glove over the small hole she pushed her head forward on her neck to get a better look at it. There was no visible open hole, however where the quill had punctured was now a black spot that looked like it had sealed the hole when the needle was pulled out. Cautiously she removed her hand from her helmet, double checking that the hole was in fact sealed.