by Allen Ivers
“The Beast had exhausted its supply of subjects. As you discovered.” Her eyes shifted aside, eye lids drooping as the drugs finally decided to whisk her away to relative comfort. “But why let us leave? What purpose would that serve?”
“The Beast?” She’d called it that quite a few times now.
She didn’t give any visible response but a blank icy stare. Not at him. At Amelia, asleep in her seat, helmet titled against her headrest. The Doctor’s lip curled, just a bit, at the sight. Actual contempt. “It’s patient. It’s methodical. Thorough. It has plans. And it doesn’t care about any of us.”
“What is it?”
She offered only one word in response: “Preparing.”
Locklear wasn’t sure when he’d fallen asleep, but he awoke to the sun reflecting off his visor like a finger in his eye. His feet were numb, prickling, and heavy. Dr. Raines had propped herself up against a bulkhead and nodded off.
She was so still and fragile, but with the quiet dignity of some ancient royal line, someone who looked down on others for being genuinely less than her. He could’ve sworn she was dead but for the faint fogging on her helmet with each shallow breath.
Nobody else was in the Rover, and the hatch was open, faint scuffling outside. Locklear found his pistol in hand, reflex triggered. He snorted at the instinct, as the pistol was about as useful as a bedtime story.
From what he’d seen, a forty caliber round wasn’t going to do much for him out here.
Locklear stood out of his seat, feeling a half dozen vertebrae pop and crack in protest. Having to stoop with the low ceiling, he clambered back to check on the good doctor.
A quick glance at her pack showed her O2 levels were low. No wonder her breathing was shallow.
He dug in the storage compartment, uncoiling the air hose to top her up. The tank on the Rover was all but expired; the others must’ve capped off their suits already.
The jerking of the air hose locking onto her suit caused Raines to startle. She murmured a moment, before realizing the hose was latched on to her.
This, understandably, caused her to have an immediate panic response. She lurched forward, trying to pull herself free.
Locklear grabbed her shoulder, pinning her down. “It’s okay! It’s okay! It’s just fresh air. Easy. Try to breathe slow.”
Her thrashing slowed as she settled out of whatever fugue her nightmares had wrapped her in. Whatever nightmares he had managed to so quickly forget, she must have had a much more gruesome edition. Her eyes wouldn't focus, her breathing short and sharp, as though a ghost had wrapped its needle fingers about her throat.
He wanted to look into her eyes, show her a calm and happy face, but the refueling of her kit required him to sit over her shoulder and allowed only a voice slipping through her suit radio.
She was going to have to trust her senses, something he sure as hell stopped doing about twenty minutes after landfall. It was a bit of a tall order for someone who had been a captive for as long as her.
The whine of the air compressor came to a halt, as the last of the pressure was pumped into Dr. Raines’ suit. Stupid. He’d forgotten to give himself a top-up.
Whatever oxygen was in his suit was all there was. But at least the fresh air was giving Raines a tactile reason to calm down, a simple benefit that assured her that all may not be as broken as she thought, that she might have reason to trust this strange man and his team of malcontents.
Locklear tapped her shoulder, a simple assurance, but he found his hand pinned by hers. The thick fingers of the glove wrapped about his wrist, firm and insistent, a rolling motion from palm to finger tips. Can’t pinch her, after all.
She had to be sure this wasn’t another misleading dream, another false sense of security before the ground collapsed under her, swallowing her whole, pulling and gnashing at her flesh until there was nothing left of her.
Okay, maybe he remembered a few of his nightmares.
Locklear peeled her hand off of his. “I’ve got to check on the others. I’ll be just outside.”
She nodded, finally confident in her surroundings.
A short hop out of the hatch and Locklear wished he’d stayed within, where his expectations couldn’t be shattered by reality.
They were only about a few hundred yards out of the canyon -- now closed, as though someone had pushed the two walls together. Normally he’d expect boulders and cracked rocks, but this more resembled two palms wrapped tight, with only a fine fault line betraying there ever had been a space between.
What was worse, Manifest was nowhere in sight, somewhere over the horizon to the East. It had only been an hour by Rover, but that meant a day’s hike by ground, especially having to carry the wounded with them.
Jazmin and Jericho tinkered with the Rover, examining the damaged axle -- the metal beam had sheared off, the end twisted and crumpled.
“Don’t suppose we have a jack?” Locklear asked, forcing a wry smile.
Jazmin didn’t even look up. “Not unless you also packed a hex wrench kit, a new axle bar, and a welding kit.” She finally looked up, swallowing hard.
Garner had brought a toolkit, but he was the benefactor of a battleground grave near the gates of Hell.
Locklear’s smile faded, unable to tear that image out of his mind. “Jericho’s got the welding covered. Maybe we just tip the thing over?”
Nobody laughed but the tension defused a bit. They at least appreciated the attempt.
Locklear looked out at the horizon, a roiling red mesa with the dancing mirages of the mid-morning heat. “Guess we’re going for a nature hike.”
Jericho snorted, transmitting that derision for everyone’s benefit.
“Where’s Amelia?” Locklear asked.
Jazmin’s eyes narrowed. “She’s not in the Rover?”
Locklear’s eyes shifted back to the open hatch, then out to the horizon. No tracks walking away from their little camp site. And precious few places to hide.
All he could think of was the warning Dr. Raines had babbled in the cave. Amelia had seemed normal, even cooperative. Frustrated at the accusations, but she had complied with every request.
She wouldn’t have just abandoned her post, and even if she had, where the hell would she have gone?
“Amelia Dane, check in,” Locklear hollered into his radio.
They all waited, each passing second freezing their blood. If this was a prank, it was a damn cruel one, and Amelia may have had her sense of humor extracted sometime during her youth.
This wasn’t like her at all.
“Amelia, this is Lock. Check in, please. Now.”
Maybe it was a problem with the gear. It had seen a hell of a time, after all. But he quietly knew that was too much to hope for.
Chapter 14
Mars
Locklear had never considered himself an outdoorsman. Hiking and camping were career hazards rather than recreational activities. And as an MP, he’d largely remained in urban environments. At least, he’d always been able to lay his eyes on a building of some kind, something with a foundation and a drunk Marine inside.
There had been some Wilderness Survival training back in BCT, but it was centered around the Pacific Northwest. More temperate regions. There hadn’t been many lessons on surviving on the alien equivalent of the tundra.
Out here, far as the eye could see, there was just more rock. He’d read his prep documents about seventeen times on the way over, and the random trivia Locklear had memorized told him that the horizon out there was about 3.4 kilometers away.
As they walked, the top floor of Manifest’s three-story command tower would eventually rise up. When they eyed that crow’s nest, they would be a scant 4 kilometers from safety. But for now, they might as well have been at the center of a red Mojave Desert, freshly repainted with human blood.
Jericho held Dr. Raines like he was carrying her to her childhood bed -- she might have been a child in his giant hands, and the reduced gravity wouldn’t be
causing huge stress.
Unlike the powerful goliath, Jazmin’s feet were dragging -- and she wasn’t carrying anything. Dare he scold her, be a commander for ten seconds? Better to be a peer for the moment. He’d lost the right to give her orders.
“How much farther?” Jazmin gasped.
Now he had to scold her. “Save the oxygen,” Locklear sniped, as few words as possible.
They didn’t have much air left, and the tricky horizon promised at least an hour or more of deceptively hard terrain. Clambering over it while muscles ached and lungs screamed was going to be difficult enough without burning through their reserves over idle chitchat.
The silence was maddening but he preferred the quiet to that burning sensation getting any worse.
He didn’t remember the ground being this jumbled on the way in, but perhaps the Rover’s suspension was more impressive than he recalled. Or those earthquakes had shaken things up.
What happened to Amelia? Where did she go? The Beast? What even was that? Had it hypnotized her? And if it got her, why not the rest? Why just the one? Why take her away? Why let them go at all? There were too many open questions, but he had his first piece of evidence that Raines was telling the truth after all.
“Land ho,” Jericho whispered, his smooth baritone as welcome as those words. Sure enough, the glint of the command tower’s dusty glass and the spire at the landing zone peeked out over the edge of the world.
“Short breaths, double-time. We’re going home.” Locklear ordered.
“Damn right,” Jazmin chimed in, as the group broke into a jog.
It was a hard jog to the edge of the compound and Locklear didn’t remember much until he heard the hiss of his own helmet as he lifted it off his ears, as a brief and powerful wind rushed into his suit, blowing through his hair and across his chest. It was a cool, crisp bite from a cold apple. Despite the damage, disrepair, and disregard, the colony’s oxygenation systems still functioned.
The locker Ready Room was precisely how they left it some fifteen hours before, not a thing out of place. Although, Locklear wished he had taken more copious notes. Knowing what he knew now, he would be looking for even the slightest deviation to give away some bizarre new trap.
Jericho got the Doctor settled on a bench. She had passed out sometime in the run, between pain and oxygen deprivation. He had to sling her onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry to prevent aggravating her wound.
Popping her helmet off proved to be a delicate task, as her head laid against the edge of the visor.
“Lock.” Jazmin waved at his face, caught between a smile and exhaustion. “Your fuckin’ eye.”
Locklear turned, looking for some kind of mirror in the locker bay. No such luck, but the reflection from his dusky helmet was all he needed to see the streaks of red criss-crossing in his left eye, blood vessels popping from the exertion and air pressure. He looked like he was turning into a demon.
“I didn’t hit you that hard, did I?”
“Shows up a day later?” Locklear laughed. “You wish.”
Everyone needed a good laugh after what they had just managed. It would’ve been a truly disappointing thing to get that close and flop just shy of the finish line. Caught between relief and collapse, Locklear let out his first good chuckle since they landed.
Had he really been running on pure adrenaline, no air in his suit? So bad that his damn eye actually started to hemorrhage?
There was more kickass in his two feet than in his whole damn body. Those feet just didn’t quit. No, sir.
Come to think of it, Locklear didn’t remember actually arriving at Manifest. Just his helmet coming off. He had blacked out.
No need to mention that, how close to death they had all really been. Let them all have this moment of levity.
Dr. Raines muttered something, her throat working while her mouth refused to cooperate. Locklear waved Jazmin over, as he stripped the rest of his EVA kit off, stuffing it into a locker, making a mental note of which locker was now his. Just as soon as he had, he had forgotten, and had to look at the numbers again. Assuming he hadn’t done any permanent damage, he was most assuredly too exhausted to think straight.
Jericho laid a hand on Raines’ shoulder, as if to quietly assure the woman to take it slow, take it easy. And she did, breathing slowing and eyes blinking, focusing. The man was a wizard. A giant, grizzly-shaped wizard.
Her head tilted left and right, working out the kinks and knots, before her eyes took aim at Locklear. “Can we barricade Manifest?”
“First priority is calling for extraction,” Locklear declared,
“Keep your suit on!” Raines snapped at Jazmin, “We need to seal the base. Now.”
“With what, silly putty?” Jazmin snapped right back.
“Didn’t you bring anything with you?”
“Plenty.” Jazmin was losing her patience. “But we had to leave your leg behind.”
Locklear stepped in front of Jazmin, giving the best stern face he could give. Maybe that single red eye would actually intimidate. “Stand down. Right now.”
Sure enough, Jazmin’s look darted back and forth between the bloody and the white, the contrast unsettling her. She took a step back, but resumed stripping her suit.
“Did you not hear me?” Oh God, Raines, not now.
Jazmin flicked her EVA sleeves off into a locker. “Yeah, but I don’t take orders from my Grandma.”
Locklear had to take control of this moment or he would never get it back. “Alright, that’s enough. Jericho, torch the airlock doors, then barricade with furniture. Everything but the space port access.”
“You’ll regret not--” Raines started, but Locklear wasn’t going to let her.
“This might confuse you, but you’re not calling the shots. You are a package being mailed home,” Locklear snarled at her. “We’re barricading what we have to. Jazmin, stay with the new kid. Keep her company. I’m going to call for the bus.”
“You did what?” Locklear had to be certain he’d heard that right.
“Look, you’ve been dark for over twenty four hours.” Piotr’s rationale wasn’t entirely wrong, and in point of fact, Locklear had been maybe twenty minutes of walking from making the Murci’s fatal assumption accurate.
And if Piotr’s story was even in the hemisphere of correct, they did everything right. Can’t honestly say he’d have done any different.
“So there’s two different aliens?” Piotr asked. “And we don’t know dick about either one?”
“That’s not true, Piotr,” Locklear said, “We know one is a mind-melding Starfish and the other is telepathic God-monster. Any follow-up?”
“Two actually. Are you a virgin, and are there any active volcanoes nearby we can use for ritual sacrifice?”
“Two marriages, kid. And a dead planet,” Locklear answered with a wry smirk.
“Eh, it was worth the ask.”
Piotr and Locklear tried to connect the dots of their misadventures -- the Starfish, likely more than one, breached Manifest and seized control of the colonists to serve as foot soldiers -- the way Locklear might get onto a bicycle.
They then marched their meat suits, somehow without EVA kits, on in an ill-fated attack on the research station. Perhaps they could protect their slaves from the cold, feed them oxygen, or simply animate the dead? But the subject of Raines’ research made short work of the pink-skinned fools.
That dinner plate fossil he found in the canyon, and its fixed turret, were probably one such KIA. Its thrall then taken for ‘study’ like Raines was. Helluva skirmish.
One Starfish managed to beat a hasty retreat, and ended up falling in with Locklear’s team. The Beast, too busy munching on dead colonists to care, let that Starfish go. Until Locklear’s team came poking about… and it took Amelia.
Was the Beast eating her too? Or did it have other plans? Could she be saved? Would he even risk it if it were possible?
“Can the shuttle make an emergency drop?” T
he last thing Locklear wanted was to be stuck down here. The colony was functional and undamaged, but something told him that wouldn’t last.
“It’s a five hour round trip… in normal operations,” Piotr muttered, doing math in his head over open comms, “...I’d be able to shave that, but we’re on escape trajectory. The shuttle would have to physically catch up to us as we leave Martian SOI.”
“But it's possible?” Locklear asked. Even he heard his voice crack, that little bit of whining starting to come out.
“In theory. How much do you like the inside of that shuttle, because this will be a proper road trip for you guys.” Piotr’s joke did nothing to cover his grave tone.
“Every passing minute is probably an extra thirty inside it, so maybe we get this rolling?”
“Locklear.” Piotr was about to explain something everyone already knew, “If we’re off by a hundredth of a percent, you might sail right past us and there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it. You might get pulled back into Mars. And you might not get to see either one because without some way of dumping heat, the shuttle will slow-cook you like a little rack of ribs.”
“So don’t miss. Because we’re not stayin’ here.”
Chapter 15
Murcielago
Leo touched dry ice as a child. The cloudy chunk had been gliding across the table, effortless and weightless. The kids were batting the three-inch sliver about with pencils and tongs in some elaborate game, where each individual had different rules they were adhering to. An unlucky bounce and the chunk dropped into Leo’s lap. He had tried to fish it out.
As repulsive and painful as it was, the sudden damage felt like it had fused the ice to his skin, a burning adhesive that itched, a knife edge stitched just under the skin, peeling and sizzling.