by David Ryker
Kick. Kick. Kick. Clang.
My boot heel hit something solid and my neck snapped my head down so hard it clicked. I stared in the twilight at the exposed metal hull of the Blower in front of me, covered with sand on all sides, but there it was. My eyes widened in shock and it was everything I could do not to scream with joy.
I ignored my aching lungs and heaved myself forward, cheeks puffed. I breathed into them and then back into my lungs, raking every measly second of consciousness I could out of whatever air was knocking around inside my mouth.
I kicked it again and more sand peeled away. The porthole of steel widened. I kicked it as hard as I could and sand started to cascade around the edges. I threw my feet into the corners of what was exposed and the sand ran like water, streaming down around me. It was on its side, top toward me, which meant the hatch was somewhere. I reckoned I had now more than about twenty seconds of air before I passed out, and that was being generous.
Adrenaline surged in me and through a pinprick of vision I watched my hands hit the steel and spider sideways. I couldn’t think — only do.
I brushed and heaved at the chunks of dirt until my fingers sang. The darkness had all but closed in when the hatch hinge burst from the sand and glinted in the moonlight.
I exhaled, unable to hold it any longer, and choked on the oxygen-deprived air. I ran my fingers around the edge and found the handle, up to my elbows in sand. I yanked it up. It took two goes before it gave, and then a torrent of sand unfastened itself and poured down on me. I fought to stay up, clinging to the handle with everything I had, and dragged myself through it, into the tube, pulling the door behind me. It sealed and the cabin lit up, blinding me. I collapsed onto the wall, the whole machine upended, and I watched distantly as my hand weakly stretched out for the big red button. My fingers touched it and my mouth opened. More air rushed in, hot and dusty. The button clicked, and I closed my eyes.
In the darkness, the hiss of oxygenation pierced the air and my lungs collapsed, squeezing out whatever was in them. My lips were parched, cracked, my head covered in sand, my suit filled with it down the collar. It itched and rubbed and grated on my skin, but I was alive, and that was all that mattered. I swallowed hard and coughed, then retched again, vomiting earthy bile onto the ground under my chin. The glass screen showed me the cockpit ahead. All my shit was everywhere, tossed around inside a giant tumble dryer drum. The cabin was bathed in red warning lights and the windshield was cracked and covered, totally buried. The surge of hope ebbed quickly, and the realization that I was still very far from home, and very far from being out of the woods, sank in.
I dipped in and out of consciousness for a few hours while my body filled with oxygen and expelled all the poison in my veins. When I finally had enough in me to lift my head, it wasn’t far to dawn. I chewed on my oversized tongue and grumbled, forcing myself upright. Hunger gnawed at my belly and thirst clawed at my throat. I’d vomited out everything that was in me and now I was running on empty. Every part of me was aching and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. But there was no time for rest. Not yet. The oxygen tanks were bigger in here than my suit, but they wouldn’t last forever. I had to get back, somehow. I had to raise a signal, get a distress call out, or something.
I clambered out of the chute and shed my walker suit, tossing it, sand and vomit clad, back inside. I shut the door and stood on the wall, steadying myself on the floor with my hand. I went for the decontamination shower first, and after unhitching the nozzle, managed to turn it into a hosepipe. It wasn’t warm, or pleasant, and the stench of chlorine was unavoidable, but the dried sick flaked off my face and out of my hair and pooled between my feet, which was a much better place for it. I used my dirty shirt to soak up what I could, and then tossed it into the chute along with my suit. I found a spare one lying around and pulled it on before going to the controls. I pressed the ignition button, but nothing happened. “Sally?” I called to silence. The internals must have been damaged. I wasn’t surprised. The engine was probably trashed too, filled with sand or torn apart in the melee. The cockpit ran off a separate power source, but functionality was severely diminished. Not even enough to power Sal. Shit. I knew she was okay, just sleeping, or as good as, but still - hearing a friendly voice would have been a welcome reprieve from the darkness of the cabin. I wasn’t liking the claustrophobia so much anymore.
I flicked the comms switch and opened all channels. “Mayday, mayday, this is a distress call. Come in.” The line crackled gently. “I repeat, this is a distress call. Does anyone read me?”
Nothing. Shit. A cold sense of dread crept up my spine as I stared at the windows, totally black. It was the sand, and it was blocking the signal, which wasn’t surprising — but it still sucked. But I couldn’t dwell on that now. Panic would be the worst thing. I had to stay focused, concentrate on getting out, not on being trapped in. I twisted the console until it was sort of facing upright, and held the manual reboot buttons. After a second it flickered dimly to life. An emergency power banner appeared and then rose to reveal a schematic of the Blower. Almost every portion of it was flashing red. I tapped on the engine and a message appeared: ‘Intakes Blocked — Clear debris before ignition.’ I kicked it hard and growled. The image strobed before settling down. No engine, no comms, limited air supply and exactly zero fucking chance of someone stumbling upon me. It’d be morning before anyone even thought to look, and from what I could work out, the wash of the jets had tossed me who knows how far from the relay I was fixing. Being found and rescued wasn’t a very likely prospect. I needed to figure something else out. If it wasn’t for the walker suit, I would have been dead. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already. But, even now that I was in my Blower, time was still limited. The oxygen levels were falling fast, and the filtration system wouldn’t be pulling any fresh air in from outside either, not with all this fucking sand. It looked like most of the critical systems were damaged, the engine wouldn’t fire, and the power cell was running at twenty percent. The Blower had taken a harder landing than me, that's for sure.
My fists curled and I pushed back from the console, looking around. Alright. I had to figure this out. How was I going to get out of there? I sure as hell didn’t want to expire on that dirt-ball of a damn planet. Born, live, and die, right there on Genesis? No thanks. I sighed. I had to think of something.
It took me thirty minutes of leafing through the technical manual of the Blower 400 before I found something useful. By that time, the air was getting soupy, sticking in my throat and squeezing my lungs like sodden sponges. I tried to ignore it, focusing on the task at hand. It was a lot easier without my vital signs flashing in my face.
The Blower 400 was equipped with a set of autonomous arms, which were attached to a motor that was attached to the subframe that connected the cockpit to the hull. The cockpit itself was a plexiglass dome and a space behind. The back end of the Blower contained all the motors, gearing, engine, and everything else that a motivated individual could need for reshaping a landscape. I traced my fingers in the dim emergency lighting over the dotted lines of the exploded diagrams, looking at the couplings and linkage.
A minute later I was prying up an access hatch I’d never accessed before. I pulled the emergency toolkit from under my seat and then went to work. About eighty screws and bolts later, the couplings were un-attached, and then I was following what was called the ‘Emergency Submersion Cockpit Ejection Sequence,’ which in layman's terms basically blew the cockpit free of the carcass, leaving it free with only the arms attached. Apparently, if a pilot was stupid enough to drive their rig into a body of water, it would sink — go figure. But the cockpit was filled with air, and pressurized, and as such would float if detached. So, in-built was the ability to do that. Doing so would engage a miniature power cell capable of running life support systems and the arms for a couple of hours. Maybe enough to dig myself free and make it some of the way home, dragging the dismembered carcass of the Blower. Maybe.
I took a rotten b
reath and pulled the lever. An explosion blew the cockpit free of the body and the sand shifted around it, rumbling deeply. Wisps of smoke drifted up out of the hatch, and then the cockpit settled again. The emergency lighting died and was replaced with the glare of the standard white halogens. The console’s screen lit up, filled with a series of bars brimming with green. The label said ‘Energy Levels.’ A smiling face flickered to life on the windscreen, too. “Good morning, James.”
I sank back onto my haunches and grinned, relief flooding through me. She might just have been wires and pixels, but seeing her face was a huge comfort. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “You don’t know how good it is to hear your voice, Sal,” I sobbed.
“It’s good to hear you too, James. I detect major structural damage to most systems, including our communications. Would you like to conserve remaining energy resources to await assistance?”
I smirked and levered myself into the seat, strapping myself sideways so I could resume control. “If we did, I don’t think anyone would come for us.” My hair flopped off the side of my head as I reached for the arm controls, grabbing hold of two gyroscopic handles. I flexed them and gears whined against the sand, like a strained grunt as it gave everything it could to shift the tons of earth crushing them.
“So, what would you like to do?”
“Let’s go home.”
3
Settlement Ninety-Three was a bit of a shit heap.
From the outside, it looked like a giant soap bubble filled with coal. The clear dome arched over the town, lined and stained by algae growth both inside and out. While it was essential for oxygenation, it got everywhere, and covered everything in a thin layer of greasy green filth. I could see it looming on the horizon, a dark growth on the pale sand.
The buildings were a collection of shanty-shacks assembled from old ship and rover parts, bolted onto Federation habs — square-shaped blocks that could be stacked modularly. They were smooth and rounded off on the corners to create a sense of ‘cleanness,’ but every single one was streaked with algae, scraped up, battered, bruised, and decorated by the inhabitants in some way, so the whole thing looked closer to a shanty town than anything else.
The main gate into Ninety-Three was a huge round airlock that fed inside, measuring around thirty meters across. A circular plate with a segment missing rotated into the ground to allow entry, and then closed off behind the ships or Droids that came in and out, before letting them through the other side. Above it was the entry tower — a double height hab unit with a miniature airlock on its viewing deck which led outside — manned by a couple of Federation sentries armed with plasma rifles. They sat around playing cards mostly, waiting for their shift to end. There was no wildlife to fend off, and there was nothing to get raided for. It was just standard protocol, and it was boring as hell to man.
The guy on duty that morning was named Jackson, I found out years later when I ran into him on Tracelon-3. He was six feet tall, and had yellowed teeth.
It was almost seven in the morning, and he was coming off the tail end of a night shift. He was leaning back in his chair, feet propped up on a table, hat pulled down over his eyes. When the droid he was on shift with started squawking, he fell backward and sprawled to the floor.
“Unknown entity approaching,” the droid yelled without warning, stepping back through the open door to the viewing deck. He was an 8C — humanoid with built-in binocular eyes and speakerbox for a face. A standard Federation sentry droid — a hundred years ago. Not exactly the most refined model.
Jackson scrambled to a stance, throwing the tail of his Federation duster back off his head. He grabbed up the scope on the table and ran to the window.
The droid stood next to him. “Subject is at seventeen degr-”
“English, dammit!” Jackson growled, ramming the scope against his eyes.
“Straight ahead, a little to the right,” the droid as good as sighed.
Jackson dialed in his scope and honed in on the approaching entity. “What the fuck?” he mouthed, dropping the scope and staring into the planes beyond the glass, still drowned in the murky gloom of the dawn.
I watched as a fleet of Treaders raced out to meet me — half tank, half troop transport, rolling fast and leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. I let off the handles and the cockpit teetered. It’d taken some doing, but I’d managed to dig myself out eventually, rolling the entire thing sideways into the canyon. After that, the filters had kicked in and the air had started circulating, which was something, at least. Then there was a lot of dragging, swearing, and falling, until I figured out that with some gentle persuasion, the arms could be positioned to lift the cockpit into the air. After the first hour, I managed a couple steps, and after that, I was walking, sort of. More like tottering. Still, it was a lot faster than crawling. I mean, it was a feat by any stretch of the imagination, whether I looked like some demented crab or not.
The Treaders circled me and ground to a halt. The dust blew over like a wave. I heard boots, then rifles cocking, and then nothing. I waited for the cloud to pass and found myself staring down the barrels of half a dozen rifles pulled tight against the shoulders of Federation sentries.
“Identify yourself!” one yelled.
I grunted and ran my forearm across my head, flicking sweat all over the floor and windows. “James Alfred Maddox,” I called through the speakers.
They stared in at me, sitting in the cockpit of Sally’s battered and dismembered corpse, likely seeing nothing but a filthy, grubby kid through the cracked glass. I couldn’t blame them for not welcoming me with streamers and a parade. I lifted my arm to show them the barcode tattoo emblazoned there. Standard issue for any colony tuber. “Don’t believe me? Come in here and fucking scan me.”
“I would advise politeness in this situation,” Sally said gently.
“Oh, I’m way past polite,” I said through gritted teeth.
One of them did, and recoiled at the stench in the entry chute. I swiveled on my chair and smirked as he dropped in. “Sorry.” I stood up and offered my arm. “Been kind of a rough night.”
They stuck an emergency breathing mask on my face and dragged me out of there, throwing me into the back of one of the Treaders without telling me what the hell was going on. In the distance, the Federation dropship that had tried to kill me lay dormant behind the settlement. I glared at it, willing it to burst into flames, but it didn’t. It just sat there, not giving two shits about the kid it’d nearly torn in two. And what was worse was that no one answered when I asked what it was doing there. Everyone leapt in and the Treader took off at pace, leaving the cockpit, and Sally, beaten and bruised in the dust. I watched her shrink into the distance, broken down in the dirt, and wondered if they’d bring her in for repairs or just scrap her, and whether my lobbying would make the slightest bit of difference. Either way, I figured I could pull her AI core and put it into the next Blower — if they gave me one at all. It all came down to whether or not I could convince them that it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t, of course, but I wasn’t sure they’d like the story too much. Little did I know that was the last time I was going to see her again.
I was basically frogmarched back through the airlock, despite my protests. The Federation sentries didn’t seem concerned about my health at all, and just more than a little pissed off that I’d managed to total one of their Blowers. They were giving me the silent treatment.
The door hissed closed behind us and we were back inside Ninety-Three. I never would have thought I would have been glad to breathe that recycled air again, but just then I was. One of them pulled the mask off and I sucked it down gleefully. The Federation dropship loomed behind the glass beyond the habs like a humongous beached whale, half obscured by the slime.
I waited, but the sentries didn’t seem to want to let go of my arms. “Hey guys, you want to let me go? I can walk on my own.” I struggled against them but they wouldn’t budge. They just marched me into the gap between the two
nearest buildings where sand became street, and then stopped, holding fast.
“Come on, guys!” I pleaded. “It wasn’t my fault.”
They didn’t reply.
I jerked my shoulders, but they held tight. “Seriously, what are you gonna do to me? I can’t afford to pay for that damn Blower…” I ground my teeth. “I didn’t do anything. It was that dropship, it…” I tried to smile but they wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Look, guys, can’t we just—”
They leapt straight and both saluted with their free hands. I snapped my head around and froze, watching three figures clad in Federation gray marching toward me. There was an officer at the front, visor pulled low, hands behind his back, rod straight, striding hard, flanked by two guards, plasma rifles hanging at rest.
They approached quickly and stopped. The officer, a Porosian on the older side of fifty, looked me up and down, recoiled at the smell of me, sighed, sneered, and then nodded. They were an odd race, almost like humans, but with pinker skin and slits for noses that flared when they breathed. “Show me,” he demanded through thin lips, voice strained to speak one of the human tongues.
One of the sentries lifted my arm roughly and turned it over. The officer pulled up his hands and ran a scanner over my barcode. It beeped and he looked at the screen on it. “James Alfred Maddox. Nineteen.” He looked me in the eye and then turned the corners of his lips down. “He’ll do. Take him away,” he said harshly.
The two sentries handed me over to the two soldiers and then disappeared. The officer looked at me indifferently.
“What the hell’s going on?” I squeezed out.
The officer stared at me for a second, and then cast his eyes at the huge black shape visible through the glass dome between the buildings. He smirked. “Conscription.”
I was strong-armed all the way across the settlement. They weren’t letting go. The streets were empty, except for the Federation Soldiers. They were swarming, like groups of wasps, knocking on doors, chasing down settlers and colonists, subduing the ones who fought back, tasering and cuffing the ones that fought back hard. Anyone between the ages of eighteen and forty, by the look of it. Conscription, though? What the hell were the Federation into that they needed to roll through Genesis-526 looking for recruits? I asked, but got no answer. I guess we were just resources like everything else that could be mercilessly dredged out of a planet flying the Federation flag. I grimaced at the thought, feeling the squeeze of the Federation boot against the back of my head. Eat it. Eat this shit!