Kali's Doom

by Craig Allen

  Kali’s Doom

  by Craig Allen

  Copyright © 2019 Craig Allen

  Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Cody stood in the hopper bay, ready to jump out the rear hatch into space.

  Grinder stood with him. “Remember the drill. Hook up as soon as you make contact. Don’t make me come find your ass when you float away. Again.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Quit your moaning.” Cody grinned then glanced nervously toward the cockpit. “So who’s driving, anyway?”

  “Autopilot. Don’t worry about it.” Grinder made his way back to the cockpit, his voice still audible over the comm piece embedded in Cody’s inner ear. “We’re depressurizing in thirty seconds.”

  “Good. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Yeah, I bet you want to head back. I hear your girl’s coming home today.”

  Cody only smiled as the hatch connecting the hopper’s loading bay to the cockpit closed. “Yeah. Been a long eight months.”

  “So how’s your sex life been during that time?”

  “Well in hand,” Cody said.

  Grinder chuckled across the hopper’s comm. “Talk to you in ten mikes, Doc. Be careful out there. You ain’t done orbital drops in, what, fifteen years?”

  “Sixteen.” Cody didn’t count the orbital drop he had done almost a year before, when the hopper he was on was attacked. He didn’t want to even think about it. “But I did this two days ago. Remember?”

  “Yeah, just don’t get cocky on me.”

  Grinder had brought up Cody’s drop days several times since Cody had been working with satellites for the fleet. Grinder—or Lieutenant Cantell, according to his name tag—had been a fan of Cody’s back before the war, when Cody did sport drops from Earth’s habitat ring. A lot of people in the fleet had been and still were.

  “Hook up, Doc. I’m cracking the hatch in ten.”

  Cody checked the seal on his helmet. “Ready.”

  Ten seconds later, the hatch opened, and the satellite came into view a good hundred meters away. Below him—at least, below him relative to the hopper—was Kali Prime in all its hideous glory. The dark, reddish atmosphere swirled as several storms crossed the surface. As of late, storms marched across Kali with impunity.

  Cody stepped off the lip of the rear hatch, and the artificial gravity vanished. He felt as if he were falling, but he knew better. He locked onto the satellite and activated the suit thrusters. The suit’s tiny grav drive pushed him gently toward the satellite, making minute adjustments Cody would never have been able to manage on his own.

  In the past, he had closed his eyes to keep his vertigo under control. That didn’t work, and his suit had taken a full thirty seconds to clean up the vomit in his helmet. In free fall around Kali Prime, he couldn’t spiral down to his doom. However, that didn’t change the fact that human senses, which had evolved in an environment where seeing an object far below meant falling followed by death, couldn’t cope with situations like orbit, no matter how safe it was.

  Cody focused on his suit’s sensors as he closed on the satellite—fifty meters then forty. A moment later, he gripped the edge of the satellite. He crawled around the side to the access panel then punched in the first code on the physical pad. The holoconsole came alive.

  So far, so good.

  Cody kept his eyes on the console and ignored the planet whirling below. Granted, the planet’s motion was normally so slight Cody couldn’t detect it. However, the satellite was most definitely spinning, taking him with it. From Cody’s perspective, the planet spun, along with the stars; the distant sun; the Tokugawa, some fifty thousand kilometers away; the hopper, a hundred meters away as it monitored his progress; and…

  Cody swallowed, took several deep breaths, and continued to enter the second set of access codes, copying the string of characters from his internal viewer’s display on the backs of his corneas, which created an illusion that the codes were hovering in front of him. Finally, green words appeared on the satellite’s holoconsole: Access Granted.

  He glanced down—at least, down from his perspective as he floated in free fall—at the planet below as he connected the download cable from his suit to the satellite. Another hurricane had kicked up, the third one that week. It spun across the red poison world, a world that had once been teeming with life—and, technically, still was. But those life-forms had been twisted into ugly versions of the planet’s inhabitants. Not that the original life-forms had been pretty to look at.

  Cody wished they could get a closer look at the life-forms, but his magnifier was nowhere near strong enough. No one could visit the planet due to the newly created reddish atmosphere, which peeled layers off the hull of any ship attempting reentry. The cause was some sort of bacteria living in the atmosphere. The Reed Entity had thought of everything when it isolated itself from humans.

  And there Cody was, floating over a planet that would dissolve his suit and, presumably, him in seconds. “Why am I out here, again?”

  He heard no answer, which he expected. Radio silence was the rule while he manually downloaded information from the spy satellites that ringed Kali Prime. The Reed Entity living below the planet’s surface claimed to have abandoned all use of technology, but no one bought that. All anyone saw of the Reed Entity were the red reeds that waved with, and against, the wind. In reality, that red grass was nothing more than appendages of a single entity, one whose biomass was spread across the breadth of the planet, beneath the surface.

  That entity had proceeded to alter the inhabitants into even worse monsters than they had been, forcing the humans to evacuate the fliers, the only friendly inhabitants humans had encountered, before they, too, were altered. All that just to keep humans away.

  The intelligence of such a massive creature couldn’t be underestimated. Standard encryption, as well as even more advanced encryption systems from Earth, were no guarantee of security when dealing with a mind of that magnitude. Thus, direct downloads had become the norm.

  Cody wondered if the advanced stealth systems onboard the satellite were actually fooling the Reed Entity. He wondered if it was simply indulging humanity’s attempt to observe the world below or if it had managed to subvert the systems without anyone knowing. The data he was downloading might have been completely false.

  At least he was keeping busy.

  Cody had decided to make himself useful and volunteered for satellite duty. Technically, he was an ambassador to the numerous intelligent species of Kali Prime. He would be again if Kali ever decided to make contact.

  Cody faced the hopper. Grinder had repositioned, pointing the nose at Cody, and he gave Cody a thumbs-up. Cody returned the gesture and turned back to the satellite just in time to see more green text: Download Complete.

  Cody retracted the communication cable into his suit. He spun around, still tethered to the satellite, and gave Grinder the sign he was ready to return.

  But Grinder wasn’t there. Neither was the hopper.

  Cody stared, confused, not accepting that the hopper had just up and vanished. He quickly looked around. Grinder hadn’t changed position. He simply wasn’t there anymore.

  Panic struck. Without the hopper, reaching the Tokugawa would take days, using the tiny grav thrusters on his suit.

  Calm down and think. Cody pulled up passive sensors on his suit. He detected the gravimetrics of the distant Tokugawa, plus a
handful of other nearby ships as they engaged maneuvering thrusters. Tokugawa’s bow spun about, and her port graser tubes were open.

  Grasers couldn’t be seen when fired, so Cody could only assume they were targeting something. Whatever it was, it was likely the reason his hopper, along with Grinder, was no longer in sight.

  Cody wanted to mourn Grinder’s death, but he had a more immediate problem. He pulled on his tether and crawled across the satellite to the other side—as if that would save him if a graser raked across the satellite. The good news was, if that happened, his life would be over so quickly that Cody wouldn’t feel anything. The bad news was he’d never see Sonja again.

  The target of the Tokugawa’s wrath came into view. A space vessel burned as it vented atmosphere. The gravimetric sensors on Cody’s suit weren’t picking it up, which meant its engines were offline. It flipped end over end, getting closer and closer to the satellite.

  Cody’s suit flashed an alarm: Collision Alert.

  There was nothing else to do. Cody detached the safety cable and pushed off from the satellite. He activated the suit thrusters on full and rocketed away. The satellite quickly grew small on his sensors, then it exploded as the burning spaceship bowled over it.

  Collision Imminent, his suit read.

  The suit’s sensors highlighted incoming debris, either from the destroyed satellite or the spaceship. He thrust to one side, and the debris whisked by—all but one piece.

  The impact was like a baseball bat across the back. Pain lanced through him as red lights highlighted the heads-up display in his suit. A diagram appeared on the suit’s HUD, showing the suit on backup power cells and the gravitational thrusters offline. Further, life support had been critically damaged, and he was on stored air, which was also damaged. Automated repair systems estimated six hours to get life support back to nominal levels.

  His air would run out in five minutes.

  Damn.

  His sensors were still online. At least he’d have a good view of things before he asphyxiated. The nearest vessel would take twenty minutes to reach his position, which didn’t include the time to launch a hopper or smaller craft to grab hold of him. And he was sure he couldn’t hold his breath that long.

  Someone squawked at him, but his suit’s broken comm system garbled the message. He tried to transmit but was rewarded with a burst of white noise in his ears. He added the suit’s comm system to the shopping list of damages. None of it compared to the less than five minutes of air remaining.

  On the plus side, his suit still had a good seal.

  Cody shut off the life-support indicator, not wanting to witness the countdown to his demise. He filed through menus, looking for his emergency beacon. Technically, anyone looking could find his suit’s transponder, but using the distress beacon would notify everyone of his position at once. Also, he might be able to piggyback some sort of message on the signal it emitted, and he could relate the urgency of his situation so that they would get to him as quickly as possible.

  He activated the signal. A burst of sparks shot out from the top of his helmet, followed by red text across his suit’s HUD: Emergency Beacon Offline.

  “Well, goddamn it.” Cody wasn’t one to swear. Maybe Sonja had been a bad influence on him.

  Sonja. She was supposed to arrive that day after returning from a stint at OCS, followed by pilot school. He smiled, thinking about her for at least the thousandth time. His grandfather would have called her a keeper. That she was, but from the looks of things, he wasn’t going to be around long enough to see her again.

  The ships in the distance hovered in space, not in any hurry, though Cody thought they should be. Hoppers zoomed back and forth, but one in particular was highlighted on his HUD. Its course intersected with his as he drifted. The small vessel was reverse thrusting though it was still a few hundred kilometers away. That meant the pilot had been accelerating at a tremendous rate to get near him. The suit estimated the hopper would reach him in two minutes, which coincidentally, was about how much air he had left.

  He hoped he’d be conscious when the hopper reached him. Or at least alive.

  Though he’d turned off the timer, he found himself counting down the seconds in his head. Somewhere around half a minute, breathing got harder. Soon, he couldn’t remember where he’d stopped counting.

  Everything became quiet.

  Somewhere, he thought he heard Sonja’s voice.

  ~~~

  Cody rubbed his temple again. The headache had vanished, mostly, and he no longer needed the oxygen mask. He stumbled out of the hopper’s rear hatch. The noise in the Tokugawa’s docking bay didn’t help with his head, but he’d be fine before long.

  “How you doing, babe?”

  Sonja was leaning against the port side of the hopper. He really hadn’t known her all that long. True, they’d met over a year before, when the Spinoza crashed on Kali Prime, but she had been gone for much of that time. Regardless, their relationship had grown quickly.

  He thought of saying something clever, but he wasn’t in the mood. He also wanted to kiss her, but engaging in public displays of affection was improper for officers.

  He settled for a more neutral greeting. “It’s good to see you. And at just the right moment.”

  “Space walks, Cody? Really?” She forced a smile, but her eyes told Cody she wasn’t happy. “You’re lucky I happened to arrive in system when I did. No one else could’ve gotten to you in time.”

  “I had to keep busy while you were away.”

  She had completed OCS and pilot’s school during that time, though the last bit seemed ancillary. She had been a capable pilot before the war, not to mention the flight time she had gained while escaping the denizens of Kali Prime eight months prior.

  “And what if something happened?” She paced. “Christ, something did happen. I had to space walk myself to drag your ass back into the hopper. What if I hadn’t been there and…?”

  When she didn’t finish, Cody spoke. “Sonja, you can’t expect me to just sit around all the time.”

  “You already had a job. Ambassador.”

  “For a planet whose inhabitants won’t speak to us.”

  “Not just the planet. The fliers too.” She stopped pacing and leaned against the hopper again. “How are they holding up in their new home, anyway? The Hive?”

  “You know about their new home?”

  She smiled. “I’ve been keeping up. Figured they’d send me back here. They’re actually looking for more people to send this way. This planet’s troubling everyone back home. They’re afraid there’ll be another war. No one wants that. The Spican war was bad enough.”

  “And now the Spicans are helping us.” Cody regarded her for a moment. “Are you okay with that?”

  The Spican war had killed her husband. To be precise, all the atmosphere had been blown off her home planet while her husband was still there. Billions died in the blink of an eye, and it hadn’t been the only world to suffer that fate.

  Seeing the look on her face, Cody regretted bringing up the Spicans.

  But her grief vanished quickly. “The war was a long time ago. I’m… I’m dealing with it.” She shook her head. “Look, can’t you just stay out of trouble while I’m away?”

  “It’s not me. It’s the planet.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean you have to hug satellites just because you’re bored.”

  “I wanted to be useful. And I did plenty of space walks before I ever got here.” He held up his hands. “Sonja, I don’t want to argue about it.”

  She folded her arms and stared across the docking bay. Cody managed not to sigh. He hadn’t wanted their first meeting to go like this after months of being apart. Eight months was a long time, and he worried it was too long.

  “It is good to see you, you know,” Cody said. “I never stopped thinking about you.”

  “Same here.” She faced him. “Look, I didn’t mean—”

  “Ensign Monroe.”

>   A chief petty officer in a crisp uniform stood close by as if he had been waiting all day, but Cody only noticed him then. He stood tall, gripping a handheld viewer in both hands. When Sonja looked at him, he went rigid and gave a sharp salute.

  Sonja returned the salute. “At ease, Chief. Can I help you with something?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The chief petty officer went to parade rest then walked past Cody as if he weren’t there and handed over the viewer. “Lieutenant Commander Paulson wants to see you immediately for your orders.”

  She took the handheld viewer without looking at it. “Thanks, Chief. Give us a minute, will you?”

  “Of course, ma’am.” The chief gave her another salute, turned crisply, and left.

  Cody frowned. “We never get a break, do we?”

  She glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then she winked. “We will. Promise.”

  ~~~

  Cody stared at the hurricane on the wall vid, the same hurricane he’d seen earlier sweeping across Kali Prime. From the observation room aboard the Tokugawa, he couldn’t make out the location of the remains of the hopper, which according to Tokugawa’s sensors, had crashed in the northern hemisphere.

  Not that they could ever learn the truth. The hopper was sitting on the surface of Kali Prime. In hours, the atmospheric bacteria would degrade the hull to the point where it wouldn’t be able to maintain a seal. In days, nothing would be left.

  Why the Reed Entity had created such a nightmare world was unknown.

  “Mind if I join you, Doctor?”

  Admiral Jericho stopped beside Cody, wearing his pristine high-ranking uniform. Cody didn’t think anything like a casual uniform existed for an admiral. They simply wore dress uniforms everywhere. That, or Jericho was wearing standard BDUs, and the actual dress uniform was far more impressive. Given the remarkable number of medals the admiral wore, the sharp creases in the proper places, and the complete lack of dirt, lint, or anything that might be construed as out of place, Cody couldn’t imagine a more impressive uniform.