by S. E. Smith
No one expected flooding to be a problem. The landing site had been carefully selected; the ship was on high ground. Stout, trillidium-reinforced truncheons acted like stilts, raising the ship a good ten feet off the surface. Carlynn kept an eye on the readings from e-stakes placed around the work area to warn of flash flooding. A drone watched over the landing site as well. Even without those precautions, the Starling was built to withstand the radiation of space, light-speed travel, and rigorous wormhole jumps across boggling distances. What was a little rainstorm?
A big, fat raindrop splattered on the forward view-shield, then another, activating the wipers. “Here it comes. I hope they are ready to be soaked,” Carlynn said in Basic, the official language of joint missions.
“Indeed.” Wenn narrowed his golden eyes at the monitors as he switched between local and planetary views on the radar. “The precipitation will continue to increase in intensity over the next few hours. Then we will see a nice sunny break until the next storm hits.”
That pretty much summed up her relationship with Lukas. The best ten wondrous and wrenching months of her life. She made a face and watched the rain fall. It came down harder now, great plunking balls of water. “It sounds like ping-pong balls hitting the fuselage,” she said.
“Ping…?” Wenn cocked a coppery brow at her.
“Ping-pong.” She smiled at the confused look on his face. “It’s an Earth game. You hit a little white ball with a paddle, back and forth, bouncing it on a table with a small net in the middle.” Her efforts to mime the game and her not-quite fluent Basic left Wenn even more baffled. Then their attention swerved to the sound of a shriek from outside.
A shriek of laughter. Rosalie, the botanist, and Seth, the soils specialist, had slipped and fallen. The layer of hard-packed dirt was quickly turning into slippery mud. Thoroughly drenched, McCloskey, their medic and geneticist, inserted samples into tubes. The zoologist, Jenkins, was out near the perimeter, almost invisible in the downpour. Morgan, the biologist and mission commander was out of view under the ship, while Tyrese, the photographer from Exo-Geographic, here to chronicle the “Great Migrations of the Galaxy”, recorded it all.
Rain sheeted down the flight-deck window, the wipers making geometrically perfect trapezoids where they swept the water away. Wenn lifted his mug to curved lips. “At such times I am glad to be the meteorologist watching the weather and not laboring in it, wearing rain gear to ward off ping-pong balls of precipitation.”
“At such times,” she said, mimicking his eloquent phrasing, “I, too, am glad not to be working outside. Here’s to being the mission’s meteorologist and pilot.” They clinked their mugs together in front of the bank of monitors. The bright screens ignited an answering flicker on the ring she wore on her left hand.
It was a wide platinum band with a hefty hunk of a diamond. It cost much more than Lukas should ever have spent when he purchased it at the CX store on Bezos Station. But when he glowed with such boyish excitement, watching her open the gift box, his blue eyes vivid with emotion, she knew she could not argue his choice. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime ring, babe,” he had explained. “No way am I going to penny-pinch over something this important.”
She could still feel the hot, dry brush of his fingers as he slid the ring on her hand. The memory of his touch ignited another kind of heat in her. They had been explosive together from the first moment they met. He proposed a month later, and she accepted without hesitation. All of it was completely out of character for both of them. Neither had made such a serious commitment to anyone else before. But all their friends, even the most jaded amongst them, agreed they were meant for each other.
Well, she and Lukas were on their way to proving that wrong, weren’t they?
She gave the ring a turn. It wasn’t like she went into their relationship expecting it to be uncomplicated. Lukas Frank was not an uncomplicated man. But that coupled with the wildness in his soul were what caused her to fall in love with him in the first place. His affectionate, heart-melting tenderness when it was just the two of them alone kept her there. As a combat vet, he was sure to have lingering issues; they all did to some degree. At first, Lukas’s flashbacks and nightmares seemed manageable. But the deeper they fell in love, the worse and more frequent the episodes became.
She had tremendous compassion for what he had been through, understood that it was a bumpy road to recovery for some. A few visits to a psychologist had given her some coping tools so she could better support and encourage Lukas. She tried her best to be a good warrior’s partner, being there when he needed her, not complaining when he retreated from her. Trying hard to laugh, to be normal. Since she had been gone, Lukas wrote her every day about normal life. While she enjoyed his notes, they also made her chest clench with an achy, desolate feeling. Love, L, he always signed off. Love. It should be enough, knowing this man loved her. This hero. Someone who had survived such hardship and rose above it all. It should be all she needed, simply loving and being loved by him. Why wasn’t it?
Because we both deserve more.
He made no mention about their last conversation on Bezos. Nothing about her leaving. Or his letting her go. His messages told her all was well, when all was not well with them as a couple.
Not even close to being well.
It was no way to live. The alternative was living without him. Giving back the ring, going their separate ways. The idea of him with other women made her heart hurt and stoked her jealousy. Even if she chose to fly only off-world cargo gigs to minimize time spent on Bezos, thanks to gossip channeled via her social circle, she would no doubt hear about who Lukas took to his bed. Once you were in Lukas Frank’s bed, you didn’t want out. She could vouch for that. But she could no more envision herself moving on to other men. Once upon a time she actually enjoyed being single. “La varietà dà sapore alla vita!” according to her Italian grandmother, Nonna Emelia. Variety was the spice of life. Apparently, her nonna was a wild, hard-to-get beauty in Naples before she fell for Carlynn’s American grandfather, moved with him to the USA and settled down. She used to run her own restaurant and told Carlynn that men were like an array of delicious appetizers—it was good for a girl to sample widely until she found the one she could not live without. Carlynn incorporated that philosophy into her dating life and it had served her well. Then Lukas Frank showed up and took her off the shelf so fast she never looked back.
“You miss your promised one,” Wenn said.
She glanced up from contemplating the ring, her lips quirking into a smile. Promised one. The Vash were so adorably old-fashioned. One was “promised” in their culture—for the highborn, anyway—not “engaged to be married”. Wenn was happily married. Despite having submitted to an arranged union, he seemed over-the-moon in love with his wife, also a scientist. “Yeah, I do,” she said. Despite everything. I miss his protectiveness, his kindness, his intellect, his body. I miss the sheer adrenaline rush of being in his company. He makes me feel alive like no one else ever has.
Or ever would. Of that she was certain.
“We’ve never been apart before,” she said.
“The first time is always the hardest.”
Wenn had no idea. She wished she could tell him more. It would be a blessing to have someone to confide in. To unload. But she would not do that to Lukas. She hadn’t even told her best friend Trysh about Lukas’s struggles. Lukas was so intensely private; he would hate anyone to know that the Hero of Glenn-Musk Station bore the kind of invisible wounds no one wanted to talk about. He was an ESF Marine—an “interplanetary” as they called themselves, an exclusive group of warriors. Group-think was that they were larger than life, almost like comic book superheroes. And if you were anything less, if you displayed any frailty whatsoever, you were weak. Which was, of course, bull.
Lukas stayed behind to save almost seven hundred people as the space station literally came apart at the seams around them. Putting his life in jeopardy countless times, he refused to lea
ve until he was sure everyone who could possibly be rescued was. It was a miracle anyone got out alive. No one expected a terror attack on Earth’s first homebuilt space station, especially not from a domestic source. Glenn-Musk was a fraction of the size of Bezos, but it was not a Federation gift. It was constructed with Vash technology, yes, but built with Earth’s financing, blood, sweat, and tears. Dually named after the first astronaut to orbit the Earth and the man who made reusable rockets commonplace, Glenn-Musk would be a launching point for an exciting new future of trade and expansion in space. But somehow the assumed-defunct Earth First movement got a bomb on board Glenn-Musk where Lukas was posted at the time.
What details she knew of his crucial role in the evacuation came from watching a vid of the ceremony where the President of the United States and Queen Jasmine Hamilton-B’kah jointly presented Lukas with the Trade Federation Medal of Valor, the Vash equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (for which he was also currently under consideration). But it was not until the day after she met him, and after they had already spent the night together, that she learned her Lukas was that Lukas. No wonder his name sounded familiar when they were first introduced. But he gave no hint why. She found out from a friend of hers after gushing about “the amazing guy I met last night”.
Sergeant Vu had been right—he was the Lukas Frank. ESF Master Sergeant Frank, the hero. Lukas’s quick thinking was the reason so many survived. He was almost sucked out into the void himself. Ears bleeding, he managed to keep an exit open long enough to load hundreds of people onto escape shuttles with only a few helpers. But about fifty civilians awaiting rescue were killed when an airlock burst. “They suffered,” Lukas sometimes ground out during his nightmares, and she suspected he meant those people. While still dazed with sleep, he would mumble into her hair as she held him close, “I saw their faces. I watched them die.”
“Oh, baby. How horrific,” she would murmur back. “That’s something no one should have to witness. But it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t. Those Earth First bastards killed them, not you.”
But when he was awake, he refused to talk about it. Flat-out refused. Instead, he wore his survivor’s guilt like a favorite old coat in the heat of summer, refusing to shed it even as it weighed him down, making him evermore distant, irritable, sleep deprived.
“I’m a Marine, Carlynn. We don’t whine about the job. I’ve got this.”
She removed her tablet computer from the cubby to write Lukas. She felt bad about not answering his message from the day before, but every time she read his usual round up of news, it reminded her of what he did not say.
What he would not say.
She loved that damned stubborn fool, loved him with all she had. It was why it hurt so bad to see him struggle. They had been apart now for only a little over a month, and already she wanted to go home—to him. But if she caved in and returned to her normal duty on Bezos early, nothing would change. It left her feeling as if she had used herself as collateral in his inner battle, forcing the man she loved to fend for himself because she was too soft to witness his suffering any longer. Appearing to abandon a man who had already endured a childhood where the people who should have been there for him weren’t.
She opened her mail app. I miss you, Blondie. I miss us. I miss what we were. She deleted the lines she had typed and started over. Joining the Fringe Worlds Project was my Hail Mary pass. A single last act of desperation with a really big payoff if it worked. But it hasn’t. She deleted that, too. The routine of writing her confessions and fears was like running intervals in physical fitness training, but this was an emotional marathon, where there were no winners, only losers.
Again, her fingertips touched the keyboard. She wished it was Lukas’s warm skin, the bristle of his jaw, the soft heat of his lower lip against her thumb…as she guided him to her mouth…
Oh, Lukas. She resumed typing. It leaves me with a choice to make—staying in our relationship and settling for bits and pieces of you, or leaving and losing all of you. It’s not all or nothing, because apparently having all of you is not an option. She deleted the paragraph, began again. I love you. I miss you. I miss us. Whatever is ripping you apart inside is stealing you away from me. I feel like I’m in competition with it, and I’m losing. I know, because you let me walk away. You didn’t fight to keep me there with you. Maybe that’s the crux of the matter. The thing that breaks my heart. What it is about pain that you need so badly that in the end you chose it over me?
Her finger hovered over the DELETE button. Coward. Where had mincing words gotten her so far? Good God, she was as stubborn as Lukas, acting as if revealing her deepest fears revealed weakness. Two peas in a pod, they were.
A chime alerted her to an incoming message, catching her so off-guard that she jumped. It was a note from Lukas. Same old news, probably. Same old side-stepping the reasons they were apart. Well, it was time one of them broke that mold. If he wouldn’t do it, she would.
Carlynn tapped SEND, her angst-ridden questions no longer held captive in her mind but now destined for Lukas’s inbox. She waited for a sense of guilt to overtake her. It didn’t. Only relief. She sensed Nonna Emilia would have thrown her hands in the air and asked what took her so long.
A shout from outside drew her attention. “They’re having way too much fun out there, Wenn. Maybe we ought to go out and join them and play in the mud.” Then a tremor rattled the ship, putting her on instant alert.
She closed her message app without reading Lukas’s new message and shoved the tablet in a cubby. A sweep of her experienced scan across the instrument panel showed nothing amiss. “All right, what was that? A quake?”
“Indeed. The sensors confirm shallow seismic activity— Great Mother.” Hands gripping his armrests, Wenn half lifted up out of his seat. “Look at that…”
Her pulse kicked up a notch at the tightness in his voice. She followed his stare. Near the inside edge of the security perimeter, in a muddy patch of ground, the surface heaved like a lake in the wind.
She hit the comm transmit button with the heel of her palm, sending her voice directly to the headsets worn by all six people outside. “Morgan—call in your team! The perimeter has been breached.” As she spoke, she tapped a series of prompts on the control panel, calling up a launch checklist on the main screen to get ready for an emergency departure—just in case.
“Already doing it,” the major radioed back. “Prepare for emergency departure if we have to make a quick exit.”
“Already doing it,” she answered. The biologist doubled as the mission commander. He called the shots.
“Drop the equipment!” she heard him order the others outside. “No! Drop it. Leave it and return to base—now!” Except for a flashlight in his hand, he was barely visible in the downpour. Carlynn reached for the console overhead and turned on the floodlights. It turned the falling rain into slashes of light and obscured the scene outside, but the forms of the six outside showed up on the infrared display.
The sporadic rattling increased. Liquid sloshed in their mugs. Carlynn snatched them off the console and emptied the contents in the trash.
“It’s spreading,” Wenn said in his measured brogue. A monitor displayed a swarm of pulsing red concentric circles popping up all around the ship. Meanwhile, Morgan worked on rounding everyone up and moving toward the gangway. They slogged and stumbled, trying to find their footing on shifting, muddy ground.
Wenn motored open the hatch. Squinting into the rain, he was soaked to the bone almost instantly, water running down his face. As the team labored closer, the ship jerked as the surface rippled, nearer the ship. Wenn lurched forward and almost fell out.
“Wenn! Damn it! Hold on to the grab bar. No performing high-dives into the mud.”
“You Earth-dwellers have no sense of adventure,” he returned smoothly. Nonetheless, he wrapped his fingers around a handle on the inside of the fuselage. Morgan and the team were almost to the gangway when the ground behind them rose
up like a cresting wave of dark brown glistening mud, waving glistening tentacle-like limbs.
“Behind you!” Wenn shouted, drawing his weapon.
From her station, Carlynn swung the floodlight around and aimed it at what she could only perceive as a twenty-foot-tall creature that looked like a cross between a starfish and a salamander. No face, no eyes. Coated in mud.
Mud monster, she thought. Her weapon was already in her hand; drawing it was so instinctive it was automatic. But the small pistol seemed a paltry defense against this thing…this mud monster. But it was all they had. This was no battleship with massive ion or plasma cannons. There was no complement of Marines along. It was a scientific vessel on a low-hazard research mission. There was no good way to defend against a larger threat. But there were not supposed to be any large predators on this world. Prior observation had borne that out.
The observation was wrong.
Four
Carlynn and Wenn fired off a few bursts of energy at the huge, writhing wall of mud. “Careful, do not hit anyone,” he cautioned her as much as he did himself. Her eyelid twitched as she waited for opportunities to fire. Flashes of bright white-green illuminated where they struck the thing, but it kept advancing as the frantic team splashed their way up the gangway.
Rosalie fell behind, viscous mud sucking at her boots. “Wait!”
Gripping his weapon in the downpour, Morgan wheeled around to help her as the other four team members, including the photographer, pounded up the ramp and through the hatch, bringing the mud and stink with them. Rosalie struggled toward Morgan but she was still ten yards away, at least. Then the huge glittering form caught up to her, and fell with her down into the mud, where the ground seemed to swallow them up.
“Rosalie!” Morgan bellowed. His cry resounded with gut-wrenching anguish and disbelief that ricocheted inside Carlynn. With gravity and mud weighing him down, he took a couple of slogging steps to the spot where she disappeared. A rumble shook the ship, the strongest one yet. A creature dwarfing the one that took Rosalie loomed up over him, a shadowy horrific vision in the floodlights and torrential rain. It clamped its limbs around Morgan, swinging him off his feet. His mouth wide open. A gush of bright red. Then Morgan was gone, too.
