by Samuel Best
She tried to sit up and screamed as a knife twisted in her lower back.
Panting hard, she forced her muscles to relax as she gently rolled onto her side. Probing her back, she felt a sharp chunk of metal protruding an inch from her lower spine. She grabbed it slowly, clenched her teeth and shut her eyes, then yanked it free.
Her scream carried throughout the forest of strange, light brown trees in which she’d landed. Leera remained on her side, breathing heavily, as she stared at the tall, naked trunks, looming toward every horizon like an army of silent sentinels. They were easily as tall as the massive Redwoods she’d read about in primary school. Atop each were three large, bare limbs of varied size. The limbs grew straight out from the main trunk for several meters, then bent upward at a ninety degree angle, giving the top of the tree the appearance of a clawed hand opening toward the sky.
Leera rubbed her bloody hand against her gel-covered body suit, smearing the black and white fabric with a streak of red.
She sat up slowly, eyes clenched shut with pain from the wound in her back. When she opened them again, she saw that her right leg was broken below the knee, her tibia snapped at a right angle, skewing the bottom third of her leg outward at an unnatural angle.
Leera leaned back, resting the back of her head against the hard rock.
Far above her, as the white clouds in Galena’s blue sky parted, the Halcyon appeared.
It took a moment for Leera to figure out why it was so much smaller than usual. Once she realized she was seeing it head-on, instead of from the side, she propped herself up on one elbow.
The ship was falling down to Galena.
Fire erupted from the starboard side and vanished. The nose of the ship glowed red-hot.
Pull up, she silently commanded the vessel, willing it to turn and ascend to orbit.
A shield of flame engulfed the front of the ship as it grew larger in the sky. Distant booms echoed across the landscape.
It looked like it was headed straight for Leera.
“Pull up!” she yelled, her body shaking with rage.
The Halcyon began to turn. The shield of flame covering its nose morphed into a narrow oval and extended to cover the entire side of the vessel as it banked, angling away from the planet.
Leera laughed and laid back, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes.
One of the engines exploded, emitting a rapidly-expanding Saturnian ring of blue energy.
Leera’s joy turned to horror as the ship cracked in half, its front end spinning away from the back, which had been shattered nearly to oblivion by the detonation.
“No,” she whispered.
She imagined her husband and son waving to her from a hyperrail platform as she receded into the distance. They grew smaller and smaller, still waving, still smiling, until, at last, they disappeared.
Minutes later, she heard the impact.
Leera had never witnessed a nuclear explosion first-hand, but that was what she pictured when the Halcyon slammed into Galena. The ground shook and the towering trees swayed in unison.
A gust of wind blasted Leera as she lay on the rock, then all was silent.
In the distance, beyond the treetops, a mushroom cloud roiled up into the sky, glowing blue and orange at its core.
“Leera!” someone shouted from the forest. A moment later, the call was repeated, this time closer.
She heard the sound of approaching footsteps on soft ground.
“Here,” she said weakly. “Walter.”
He climbed the boulder and appeared at her side. His body suit was smeared with black, and his short red beard was slick with gel. Blood surrounded a small rip in the fabric over one of his thighs and trickled from a thin cut on his bald head. One lens of his glasses was missing.
“I knew it was you!” he said, his face beaming. “I didn’t think—”
He stopped when he noticed her broken leg.
“Oh,” he said softly. “What have you done to yourself?” He knelt closer to the fracture. “Not compound, thank goodness.” He sat up and looked at her. “I don’t suppose any med kits have fallen from the sky while you’ve been here?”
She shook her head.
“I have to set it,” he said. “You understand?”
Leera wiped a sheen of sweat from her face, then nodded.
He turned his back to her, straddling her legs so she couldn’t see below her waist.
“Scream if you need to,” he said.
It felt like someone ripped her leg off, so she screamed.
Leera awoke to Walter kneeling beside her, gently shaking her shoulder. She sat up quickly and regretted it, cracking the dried blood that had begun to form over the wound in her back.
“I’ve nothing to bind it with,” Walter said apologetically. “You blacked out, by the way.”
Leera noticed he was missing a sleeve.
He had managed to remove it and slip it over her right leg up to her knee, compressing her shin and the large knot that bulged from the bone. She wiggled her toes, but couldn’t feel them.
“It will heal straight enough, but you might have a slight limp if I can’t get it properly bound soon.”
“Thank you, Walter,” she said. “And for your next magic trick, how do I get off this rock?”
He scooted to the edge and hopped down to the ground. Leera moved like a three-legged crab, inching her way in painful increments. Walter reached up and grabbed her waist as she slid off the boulder, then supported her weight to set her gently on the ground on one bare foot.
The patched green-and-brown soil was spongy and slightly damp.
“If these trees had branches, I could make you a crutch,” said Walter, looking up.
Leera eased down to sit with her back to the boulder, breathing hard from the exertion. She pressed her fingers down into the soft, moist ground. An electric shock snapped her fingertips and she jerked her hand back, inhaling sharply.
“What is it?” Walter asked, hurrying to her side.
“The ground shocked me,” she answered, rubbing her fingertips together. “Low-grade current, like a static shock.”
Walter stuck his index finger into the soil and yelped in surprise at the shock, but didn’t draw back.
“It’s constant,” he said.
“I would bet the moisture helps with conductivity.”
She sank her fingers into the soil again, more slowly, feeling the onset of the shock as a thousand pins dancing over her skin, tingling all the way to her bones.
“Doctor James!” someone shouted from nearby.
Walter stood quickly as Corporal Turner appeared from around the other side of the boulder, wearing a muddy body suit and carrying a slender gray rifle. He was uninjured except for a red scratch on the side of his calf that tore the leg cuff of his skin-tight suit.
He let out a massive sigh of relief when he saw the other two.
“I heard you screaming,” he said.
“I’m grateful my howls of pain are so recognizable.”
“Doctor Lyden, are you alright?” he asked Walter.
“I’m fine, Corporal. Did you see anybody else?”
Turner shook his head as he looked around the small clearing with wide eyes. Leera thought he seemed a touch manic, wavering between elation and terror.
“Where are we?”
“Not where we’re supposed to be,” Walter replied.
“So how do we find the colony?” He looked at Walter. “You can find it, right?”
“Hello!” someone called from the forest.
Turner swung his rifle toward the voice. He quickly lowered it when another passenger from the Halcyon came into view. Her short brown hair was slicked back with gel.
“I thought I was alone,” she said, looking over the trio by the boulder. “I’m Uda.”
“I’m Walter. This is Leera and Corporal Turner.”
“Are there no others?”
Walter shook his head. “Not yet.”
“W
e only have a few hours of daylight,” she said, glancing skyward. “We need to get to the Halcyon. What’s left of it. Each blackbox contains a nav beacon that leads to the colony.”
“There’s nothing left!” said Turner. “Didn’t you see the fireball?”
“Calm down, Corporal,” Walter said. “You’re supposed to be our escort, remember?”
Turner swallowed hard and wiped his brow. He nodded and gripped his rifle firmly. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”
“How’d you get that thing down here, anyway?” asked Walter.
Turner looked at his rifle, confused by the question. “I just…brought it in the tank with me.”
“Can you walk?” Uda asked Leera, glancing down at her leg.
She shook her head, strands of wet hair slapping her cheeks. “Not on my own.”
“Maybe you should wait here.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Leera.
Turner slung his rifle over his shoulder and bent down to help her up. She groaned when her shin bumped against him. Sweat dripped from her chin as she took her first tentative hop.
“The ship should be easy enough to find, right?” said Uda, walking into the forest in the direction of the mountainous mushroom cloud. “Just follow the fireball.”
Turner draped Leera’s arm around his neck and acted as her crutch, helping her hop away from the boulder, following after Uda. Walter stayed close behind them, ready to catch her if she fell.
Leera bit her lower lip as pain stabbed her back with each step. They would need to find a med kit soon, or another way to seal her wound. The air of Galena was breathable, but there had been no studies conducted on a microbial level. She shuddered to think of an alien bacterium worming its way into her blood stream and turning it to jelly.
“We can shelter at the Halcyon for the night,” said Uda from the head of the line, “if we make it in time.”
“How long does night last?” asked Turner.
“Six hours. Slightly longer during the winter.”
“Will it be cold?” Walter asked.
“Not so bad this close to the equator,” she replied. “Temperature drops below freezing some nights.”
“Are you a farmer?” asked Turner.
After a few moments, Uda said, “I am now.”
Walter walked next to Leera. “Do you think Niku’s alright?” he asked.
“Oh, you know him,” she replied. “Like a duck in water wherever he goes” She put her pale hand on Walter’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
The trees thinned atop a wide hill, creating a small clearing. The group stopped in the clearing, surveying the tree-covered landscape that sloped away in every direction. Ahead of them in the distance, the wispy remnants of the mushroom cloud snaked across the sky. Below it, the smoking wreckage of the Halcyon was strewn for miles, the bulk of it in a heap at the end of a deep, black scar that cut through the forested land.
In the distance to their left, beyond several desolate square miles of nothing but lead-colored rock, stretched a vast, gray ocean, its shore studded with large boulders. Massive peaked waves appeared as tiny pyramids from afar. To their right were mountains with vibrant green peaks that scraped the clouds.
“Is it what you expected?” asked Uda.
No one had an answer.
They set off down the hill, toward the wreckage of the Halcyon.
TULLIVER
He was trapped.
Escape pods were equipped with two landing boosters for rapid last-minute course corrections. The main purpose for them was to ensure the pod landed at least somewhat gently on its back, ideally sliding to a gentle stop on flat ground. If such a landing wasn’t possible, the pod extended its ground spike and struck the ground like a lawn dart, its passenger compartment filling with impact foam seconds before landing.
Tulliver’s escape pod had hit a tall pole as its boosters fired, sending it spinning sideways to smack into another pole. The pod tumbled down to the surface like a flipped coin and cracked against a boulder, denting its hatch inward, further compressing the blue impact foam that filled the passenger compartment.
Without knowing which technique to employ, the pod continued firing its boosters while also extended its ground spike. It hit the ground spike-first at a forty-five degree angle, sinking in up to the base of the pod.
Tulliver could hardly move within the foam. It had done its job and kept him alive during the crash landing, but it was supposed to be ejected as soon as the hatch slid open.
The only parts of his body he could move below his chest were his toes, which he wiggled uselessly within his heavy boots. The porous foam pressed against his face, smothering his breath.
His left arm was pinned at his side, but his right had some room to move. He shrugged his shoulder up and down, bent his elbow, twisted his wrist — the foam would not budge.
Tulliver made a fist and pushed it into the foam. It sank in, molding around his knuckles.
So that’s the trick, he thought.
He extended his fingers and pushed deeper, working his way slowly toward the dented hatch. One fingertip touched a hard surface. Tulliver tried to grin, but the foam smashed his cheeks down.
It had been so long since he’d needed to exert his full strength that Tulliver was forced to wonder if he still had it in him. Usually he enlisted help for such tasks.
He made a fist once more, and pushed, his entire body shaking from the effort.
The foam around his arm expanded to make room for his flexing muscles. His fist touched the hard surface of the inner hatch. Imagining all his strength flowing to his arm, he yelled with exertion as he forced the hatch away from the foam, inch by inch, until it popped loose with a loud CRACK and fell away.
The foam instantly fractured into half a dozen smaller chunks and tumbled out of the pod, scattering across the featureless gray ground.
Tulliver coughed away the oppressive chemical smell of the foam and heaved great breaths of Galena’s fresh air. Looking up, he saw the broken top of a towering tree trunk that his pod had impacted. A chunk of its dark inner material had been torn away and now lay strewn across the ground, like tire shreddings.
Tulliver grabbed the sides of the hatch frame and pulled himself up to stand in the pod. He was in a shallow valley. Towering bare tree trunks formed a crown atop the surrounding hills, rising toward the blue sky. The ground was mottled green and brown, covering the entire landscape in every direction, except for a patch around Tulliver’s pod that seemed to fill the valley like a lake. Yet the patch wasn’t liquid. It was hard, gray, and unnaturally flat — markedly sterile in a vista of earthy colors. The ground beyond the gray patch had a mossy texture and glistened with moisture, while the gray section had a smooth, unbroken surface with slight geometric protuberances, almost like small pyramids, rising several inches from the top layer.
Tulliver climbed down the outside of his pod and extended a boot toward the ground.
The solid gray surface split open to reveal the patchy green and brown soil a short distance below. Tulliver jerked his foot up and nearly lost his balance. He clung to the side of the pod as the split in the gray came together and vanished, leaving no hint of its existence.
He tested the reaction again by lowering his leg a second time. Again, the ground split. This time he stepped against the greenish-brown covering, putting a little of his weight on the spongy surface, then hopped back onto the pod. The gray ground sealed the opening once again.
Tulliver frowned when he looked at the nearest edge of the smooth gray patch. A lead-colored rock mostly buried in the ground had been exposed within the last few moments.
The patch of gray was moving.
“Ahoy!” someone shouted at him from afar. “Hullo there!”
Tulliver climbed on all fours to the top of his leaning pod. Another pod stood nearly upright on its ground spike thirty meters away, at the edge of a dense stand of looming tree trunks. A short, bone-thin older man with a bright w
hite mustache was inside the open compartment, waving his arms in the air. He wore a dark blue tracksuit and white tennis shoes. The hatch to his escape pod and chunks of impact foam were scattered on the gray ground nearby.
“Yes, hullo!” he called when he saw Tulliver. “You there! Are you hurt?”
Tulliver thought for a moment, then shouted, “My leg is injured! I can’t walk!”
The man looked at the gray ground with trepidation.
“It moves, you know,” he said nervously. “The ground moves.”
“Please hurry!” Tulliver yelled.
The man nodded to himself, then waited, then nodded again and finally climbed down his pod. As he hopped to the ground, the gray surface opened in a circle to admit his white tennis shoes.
After two experimental hops in place, the older man grinned, his mustache curling up in a smile of its own.
“Marvelous!” he cried.
As he walked toward Tulliver’s escape pod, espousing the view that they were lucky to be alive, the circular opening in the ground moved with him like a spotlight tracking its subject and sealing again in his wake.
He had crossed half the distance to Tulliver’s pod when the hole stopped moving. His ankles bumped against one edge and he looked down in confusion.
“I say!” he declared. “I do believe I see legs!”
He knelt down to peer in the gap between the gray covering and the softer ground beneath.
“Don’t!” said Tulliver loudly.
The gray ground swelled up around the older man like a rising volcano. His terrified face disappeared from view behind a wall of gray as the hill rose higher. The circular opening closed at the peak, then the hill gently lowered back down to the ground, flattening out to its previous unbroken plateau.
The older man was gone, smothered beneath the gray.
Tulliver swallowed thickly and wiped sweat from his eyes with a shaky hand as he turned away. He climbed around to the front of his pod, then settled into the padded compartment and stared up at the blue sky as a distant explosion shook the tree trunks. The trunks swayed against the sky, creaking as if in a strong wind. Tulliver leaned forward to gaze over the edge of the pod. An enormous mushroom cloud billowed into the sky, blue and orange fire glowing from within.
