The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

They flew a curved orbital path around the planet, descending towards waypoint two.

  “Okay, coming up to waypoint two. Ejection sequence initiated. Standby guys, we’re all lined up and ready to go. Good luck,” said motor.

  “Good luck,” replied Chip.

  “See you down there for tea and biscuits,” joked Crier, smiling tightly to himself.

  “Viper Two ready. All systems normal. We’ll assemble at the landing zone. Out,” reported the robotic voice of the battledroid.

  “Here we go in five, four, three, two, one…”

  One minute Motor and Fuzzy were looking only at the black interior of the Viper drone beyond their contact lens displays and the next they were being propelled away from the flyer by the explosive charges in the ejectors. The Viper shot off into the distance, the first signs of burn-up glowing around her nose, before she disappeared below their viewpoint. Moments later, the heat shield below their manpod burst into being, like a supercharged umbrella opening faster than the eye could perceive. The recumbent seat pushed hard into Motor’s back as the pressure wave of the alien atmosphere resisted the descent. He could now only see the purple-black of space and the growing blades of entry-fire flaring around the edges of the heat shield.

  “Manpod One reporting normal, descending towards LZ within tolerance, separation from manpod in six minutes fifty-seven seconds,” reported Chip.

  “Okay Chip, received. Manpod Two, report please,” Motor instructed his robotic companions.

  “Manpod Two reporting normal, descending towards LZ within tolerance, separation from manpod in five minutes forty-nine seconds,” reported the battledroid.

  “Okay guys, sit tight. All we can do is monitor and wait now,” said Motor.

  This was a critical phase of Operation Rapid Denial. They had no cloaking now and only the rudimentary protection of the manpod armour and that of their battlesuits to save them should the aliens open fire. Motor had already acknowledged they’d been covered several times by alien radar sweeps, but so far so good. The idea was that the aliens would interpret them as meteors entering their atmosphere, burning up before reaching the ground. It looked like the aliens were buying it. The next stage involved separation from the manpod and its heat shield, once they’d slowed to a speed where burn-up was no longer a problem. Just prior to separation they’d activate the battlesuits’ invisibility function and freefall until two hundred metres above ground level when their parachutes would auto-open.

  The plan ran through Motor’s mind. He checked his contact lens display, willing it to count down faster: still two minutes to go. Orange fire surrounded them. Only the top-middle of his viewpoint now showed the darkness of infinite space above. Outside temperature: minus eighty-one Celsius. No weather at this altitude and no idea of the weather below. They’d dared not switch on their active sensors to get a fix on the weather for fear of detection. Besides, they’d find out soon enough and there wasn’t a lot they could do about it. The uncertainty of everything was the hardest thing for Motor. They were the first people to set foot on an exoplanet and doing it like this was not the way he’d imagined it until recently. There was none of the fanfare, the pomp and the worldwide celebration that had accompanied the Mars landings in 2025, or the Moon landings way back in 1969. Almost a century ago now. A different world, a different age but some things hadn’t changed. Same old enemies and possibly a powerful new one. Motor’s thoughts were interrupted by Crier’s voice over the headset.

  “Shit! We’ve been pinged, boys!” called Crier.

  “Only forty-five second to go, guys. What’s the bandits’ ETA, Crier?” asked Motor urgently.

  “At current speed and heading, thirty seconds tops. Looks like they’ve been scrambled from a surface base. Thankfully, slower than the fighters that buzzed us in orbit,” replied Crier, rapidly.

  “Okay, it’s touch and go but I’m gonna say let’s do an early separation. Execute order now, boys. Set invisible fast and radio silence… Go, go, go!” shouted Motor as he exchanged a quick nod with Fuzzy then executed the separation. The two soldiers jettisoned out of the manpod as it tumbled away from them displaying only an afterglow of orange from the entry on its heat shield. Motor activated his invisibility function then put his body into a freefall dive wanting to cover the remaining thirty thousand metres as quickly as possible and minimise the frictional loads heating his battlesuit to the point where the cooling system was not managing to keep up. He checked his contact lens HUD and checked his men's status. The status requests and results would be sent as short-range microbursts and they’d be the last signals he’d send for fear of detection.

  Fuzzy: lifesigns normal, in freefall, invisibility activated

  Chips: lifesigns normal, in freefall, invisibility activated

  Crier: lifesigns normal, in freefall, invisibility activated

  Battledroid Alpha: condition critical, in freefall, invisibility not available

  Battledroid Beta: no signal

  “Shit!” gasped Motor to himself. “What the fuck happened to the droids?”

  He was low enough now to change his freefall orientation. He came out of his dive to see the fireball receding above him as he fell. Alien laser fire flashed across the sky above him. He saw another, smaller explosion and checked his HUD fearing the worst:

  Battledroid Alpha: no signal

  “Damn it!” he shouted. “Both gone! Alien bastards!” The droids didn’t have a chance strapped into their pod. They were tough but they weren’t invincible, especially caught by surprise falling through the sky. He went back into freefall, took a deep breath and composed himself. He had men to lead. They needed him thinking straight more than ever now with their battledroids blown out of the sky. He needed to use his body shape and arm and leg thrusters now to home in on the landing zone—the LZ. It would delay and endanger their mission immeasurably if they ended up scattered all over the place in hostile territory, alone. Fortunately, the backpacks were firmly secured to their suits and the key items – HK750 battle rifles, suitcase nuke, some demo charges and the FTL-gate and its fusion pack – were all with the human soldiers. The battledroids had been carrying the EQP transceiver sets and all of the Hummingbird recon drones. They’d also carried the firepower to take on a small army. They now had no comms with Earth and no recon drones to pave their way to the Alien base and the Santa Maria probe. It was already Aliens one - Humans nil, and the visitors could not entertain failure in this high-stakes game.

  Once below the troposphere, Motor noticed the wind really pick up speed. He was being buffeted away from the landing zone coordinates. He arched his back and headed towards the LZ, constantly needing to adjust his body position to maintain heading. He pushed his arms backwards, past level with his body and bent his knees slightly in an effort to increase his horizontal thrust vector. The arm and leg thrusters were already on as full a throttle as they could manage whilst still maintaining balance. His battlesuit computer was constantly adjusting them to ensure he was not sent into a spin like a Catherine wheel due to an imbalance between thrusters. He was whizzing through clouds and rain until five-hundred metres when the cloud seemed to clear.

  The inertial guidance didn’t require signal emissions to work out Motor’s altitude and it was good enough to get him within the two-hundred metre diameter LZ, all going to plan. But it had not gone to plan: first, the early separation then the strong winds. The computer estimated he’d be over two kilometres away from the LZ, and with no idea of where his men were he just had to hope that the aliens hadn’t projected their trajectories from the battledroids’ flight path and sent out a welcoming committee.

  Motor switched on the night vision function on his contact lenses. There was enough ambient starlight on the moonless night to show the forest canopy hundreds of metres below. No true colour could be discerned, but the canopy appeared remarkably flat and smooth to Motor’s eyes; he was half-expecting the bumpy, bushy foliage of Earth’s tropical forests even though the probe h
ad revealed daylight pictures of the scene below him. There were slight undulations like a dark, calm Caribbean sea. The floor of large, flat leaves had few gaps and those there were appeared polygonal on account of the straight edges of the bordering canopy. His altitude was dropping fast: four-hundred, three-fifty, three-hundred, two-fifty, and then, dead on two hundred metres, Motor felt the yank of his parachute harness as it flowered above him, breaking his fall. Suspended from the chute, he tried desperately to achieve a stable heading back towards the LZ, using every second in the air to shave off trek time in the alien forest below. The wind had died down only slightly and he was swinging around in his harness like an erratic pendulum. He looked down and saw the flat canopy closing in faster and faster. He braced himself for landing on the unknown surface, bending his knees, and flaring his chute five metres above the canopy, gently lowering him at a snail’s pace, but still blowing around in the wind more than he’d have liked. Closer, closer and … down.

  The canopy flexed under his weight, but held with a series of cracking sounds as if the supporting branches below the giant leaves had been partially broken. The chute enveloped Motor as he squatted down and took a breath, thankful to have made it. He bundled up the parachute and released himself from the harness. He and his backpack were invisible, but the parachute and harness were not. They would need to be hidden once he’d worked out how to get down to ground level. He got to his feet and pushed on the canopy surface, testing its rigidity. It seemed just strong enough, but wobbly and unsettling. He took a tentative step forward towards a long, narrow gap several metres away. Taking baby steps, he advanced, contemplating being able to trek to the LZ on the canopy, thus avoiding the forest floor altogether. At least he had good line of sight up here and he was virtually invisible with the battlesuit on. As he edged forward, the canopy seemed to get weaker and weaker, flexing further and further downward as he neared the gap until...

  “Arrggghhh!” falling ... falling fast. Then came the surprisingly cushioned landing. Motor concluded his fall had been broken only by the bundled up chute he was holding until he lifted his head and looked around him at the alien forest and saw what he’d landed on. Through the night vision, it looked like a giant brain coral but it felt soft and rubbery. What was more spectacular was the source of light by which his night vision was operating. He’d not activated his IR illumination as he was keeping emissions-silence to avoid detection; and besides, he wasn’t viewing in the infrared wavelengths. There was no way the faint starlight would have penetrated both the cloudy sky and the opaque forest canopy. The answer lay in the hundreds and thousands of tiny points of light that lit up enormous columns of wood, which were the tree trunks of the alien forest. Like glow-worms or static fireflies, this light was biochemical in origin and the density of illumination was enough to delineate the thick, redwood-like trunks towering high above him. They must have been a hundred metres tall with virtually no branches or leaves on the way up until the eye reached the framework of wooden limbs supporting the horizontal, flat canopy. He looked down again to what he’d landed on and pushed his finger until the surface split. It was like a giant mushroom, a fungus of some sort. Looking around him, the giant, shallow pinnacle of this fungus seemed to dominate the forest floor. Given the lack of light that would penetrate down here, even during the daytime, Motor found it logical that fungus-like organisms would have evolved in this Earth-like place. It was more like dark cave conditions than the forests of Earth.

  Despite the soft landing, his head had jarred down on impact and he lay there on his stomach feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. Nothing serious, he thought as he started to move his joints and lift himself to a seated position. He checked the environmental readout on his contact lens HUD:

  Temperature: 28 degC

  Pressure: 1215 mbar

  Gravity: 12.01 m/s2

  Humidity: 98%

  Atmospheric composition: 67% Nitrogen, 27% Oxygen, 3.1% Neon, 2.5% Argon, 0.37% Other

  The higher gravity on Gaia explained why he felt it took more effort to lift himself off his stomach. Sitting on the round head of fungus, he slid down to the soggy forest floor. There was a distinct lack of leaf litter—more like small rocks in a shallow expanse of mud. The efficiency with which the forest canopy monopolised the Avendano sunlight was, Motor decided, the reason for the lack of photosynthesizing plant cover. At twenty-eight degrees, the temperature was far hotter than such a dark place would have been on Earth, with no chance, even in the daytime, to benefit from much sunlight. Motor wondered how hot the unforested tropics of Gaia, that he’d seen from orbit, would be. He pulled out his survival knife and sliced open the large, mushroom-like fungus he’d just dismounted. After hacking through some internal structure, he found enough hollow space inside to stuff in the parachute. He found another fungus and used that to hide his harness.

  He switched his battlesuit from internal air generator to atmospheric intake and the first breath of the Gaian atmosphere invigorated his senses. The oxygen content here was six percentage points higher than that on Earth and he could feel it. He quickly adjusted the suit’s air composition settings to dial down the oxygen, dial up the nitrogen and set the pressure at one-thousand millibars, thus mimicking Earth’s atmosphere. Although the higher oxygen concentration felt good, Motor knew from his training that oxygen toxicity was a real risk. It could lead to tunnel vision, nausea and difficulty breathing if inhaled for too long.

  Motor pulled his HK750 battle rifle from his backpack, saw its invisibility function was normal, and checked his bearings. The landing zone was just over two kilometres away—only thirteen minutes at double-speed march, but longer at the cautious pace he had in mind. This was technically a hostile environment, even if no real threat had so far manifested itself on the ground.

  He advanced the first few steps observing all around every few paces until he felt comfortable to advance normally, weapon ready to engage in a split second if necessary. He set his shoulder pod to sentry mode, scanning three-sixty like a lethal radar dish, its missile array and pulse laser at the ready. The shoulder pod would identify and require permission to engage first—the last thing he needed was to open fire on an alien squad too big to take on. For all he knew his colleagues could have been nearby, but their protocol was to reach the centre of the LZ then broadcast a coded, short-range microburst. Once they’d identified each other and scanned for threats they’d deactivate invisibility, establish comms and reunite in person.

  There was still due to be another sixteen hours of night, followed by an eighteen hour day. The cannula, through which his intravenously fed nutrients, water and meds were being supplied, itched a little. Even though the hollow tube through which he’d be sustained was as flexible and soft at rubber, he could still feel it sometimes. There was no need to stop for food and water as the dry food carried was light and super-concentrated and the water would be condensed from the atmospheric water vapour by the battlesuit. Medical compounds like painkillers and melatonin for sleep induction could be administered intravenously on-demand straight from his contact lens display.

  Advancing forward towards the LZ, Motor felt like he was in a giant cave. Scanning and observing, he started to notice other things about the forest as he covered the first few dozen metres. Red circles, in pairs, blinked silently on and off. They didn’t move, but appeared occasionally on the trunks of the trees, but never right near ground level. They looked like the eyeshine from some camouflaged, tree-dwelling animal. They presented no threat so he continued cautiously forward. He could hear a faint clicking sound from time to time, like a Geiger counter. It came from every direction. Occasional howling noises were audible, but from some distance away. The sounds of the alien forest put him on edge more than he would have liked, even in the knowledge that his shoulder-mounted weapons systems could take down a charging rhino if it were foolish enough to threaten him.

  One kilometre to go. He was tempted to send out an early microburst, given t
he low threat level, but discipline kept him from doing so. There was something about this place that was piquing his need for human companionship. Perhaps it was the psychological weight of being fourteen-thousand-billion kilometres away from his precious wife and daughter in an alien environment.

  Five hundred metres to go. Invisible, quietly moving forward, almost at the rendezvous point in the middle of the original LZ. There: movement. The battlesuit sensors and arrow off the right hand side of his contact lens HUD prompted him to turn around almost one-eighty. Nothing. Movement again, this time in his field of vision. Flying past ten metres distant and above eye-level, but just a blur in his night-vision, but tracked by the shoulder mounted targeting system. Damned fast and damned big too—or at least bigger than the birds Motor’s mind was used to seeing back on Earth. No detail though. “What was that thing,” he whispered to no one. “Better keep moving and keep an eye on the targeting.” He set it up for target inset still. If there was any attack from behind he’d have an instant still picture to assess what it was; although he’d be unable to respond in time to a surprise attack if the flying creature had somehow managed to discern his presence. He’d have to rely on his stealth and battlesuit armour before opening fire on unknown wildlife and possibly giving away his position.

  He continued forward. No more visits from whatever it was that had flown past earlier. Motor reached the rendezvous point and squatted down against one of the enormous tree trunks several times thicker than a giant redwood. He was uncharacteristically breathless and tired, having only travelled a little more than two kilometres. The twenty percent higher gravity was something he was going to need to get used to. They’d considered exoskeletons for the missions, but given the SSS soldiers’ levels of fitness, agility and the relatively short distances involved, they did not want to complicate the mission by bringing the extra gear.