Terra Nova (The Terra Nova Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  Carson shrugged. “Out in the open? Don’t know if doughboys can breathe carbon dioxide. But if we do find where the rest of the colonists are, I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “Where do you think those things came from?”

  “I have no idea. Pretty sure I won’t like the answer, though.”

  “What’s that?” Popov pointed at the landscape in front of them.

  Carson squinted in the direction indicated and saw a dark mass in the distance, hazy and distorted. She worked her HUD’s optical sensors, zooming in on the object.

  “Is that a…tree?” Carson said, sharing the image with the rest of the team. Bare branches sprouted from the top of a black trunk and arced down like weeping willows. Carson imagined a lone crow perched on the end of one of the branches, completing the eerie sight.

  “Let me see,” Nunez said. “Definitely organic in origin. Not reading any heat off it, so it’s dead. Doesn’t match any low-atmo vegetation on record. I’d expect some moss or lichen beds here, not something that big.”

  “It’s not that strange,” Birch said. “I’ve been on more than one artifact world where old plant life survived the apocalypse. Nature’s funny that way.”

  Popov shuddered. “Doesn’t look that funny to me. Looks creepy.”

  “This planet must have been habitable at some point in the recent past,” Nunez said. “The Rover’s sensors are picking up trace amounts of radiation that…” He trailed off and Carson turned. The Pathfinder sat, head down, consulting the screen on his gauntlet. A second later, he looked up. “I’d say this world’s only been this way for two or three thousand years, tops. Whatever stripped the atmo and led to all the water boiling off must’ve happened pretty fast.”

  “Fast enough to be intentional?” Carson asked.

  “Fits what we see,” Nunez said. “Though the tech required to do such a thing…”

  The news about the planet’s recent history didn’t do anything to calm Carson’s nerves about the mission. So far, the promise of Terra Nova being in uninhabited space, free from any potential hostile species, was looking more and more like a lie.

  Birch brought the Rover to a halt a half klick from the crash site and the team filed out, taking up combat stations around the vehicle.

  “Remember,” West told them as they started for the site, “this isn’t Terra Nova or Earth. The atmosphere will kill you if you spill your air. Stay sharp and keep your heads on a swivel.”

  Carson stepped off the ramp, onto the alien planet. The hard-packed dirt gave slightly and the gravity difference made her feel like she could jump a kilometer in one leap.

  Wind blew against her suit, not quite powerfully enough to affect movement, but she could definitely feel it. Dust particles zipped past her, some small bits musically clinking on her helmet. A dust devil spun lazily off to their right, throwing the reddish-brown soil high into the sky.

  Swinging an arm forward, the hand signal for “follow me,” she activated her camo cloak and marched toward the ridgeline where the downed ore freighter waited on the other side.

  Carson looked over her shoulder. Her team’s camo kept them mostly invisible. Dust slid off their specially treated cloaks, but the puffs of dirt from their footsteps were unavoidable. The strong breeze dispersed most of it away, but they were giving off a signature, and an enemy could detect it.

  Field conditions will never be perfect, she thought, but they can be mitigated.

  As they continued on in silence, Carson checked their progress on a map projected on her HUD, still keeping a pace count from where they left the Rover. Pathfinders were trained to recover from a complete failure in equipment. One of the more brutal exercises for candidates was held in the Florida swamps where candidates spent days using modern tech for land navigation, then during an especially long trek, their gear was shut off. Any who didn’t reach their final point, or panicked and called for help, were dropped from the program.

  “Doesn’t feel like Mars,” Birch said. “Soil’s different. The mountains have extensive water erosion. I just walked over a patch of limestone. None of that on Mars.”

  “I never made it to the red planet,” Popov said. “Got rushed through training on Luna instead of making the sprint out there with the rest of my class. Kind of regret that I didn’t go when I was a civilian. Not like I’ll ever have the chance to see it now.”

  “Mars is mostly like this,” Nunez said. “Except redder. And colder. And full of macro cannons and armor. Birch, is it true you can’t get into Olympus unless you’re Armor Corps?”

  “Invitees are allowed. Said invitees are never allowed to discuss what they saw inside the mountain,” Birch said.

  “But we left the galaxy,” Nunez said. “It’s not like any of those walking tanks would know you spilled the beans. Give us a little something of what you saw.”

  “If you call armor a ‘tank,’ they’ll crush your skull,” Birch said.

  “Oh, what else?”

  “I’ve said too much,” Birch said.

  “Almost there.” Carson pointed to a gap in the ridgeline. “Popov, set up a laser dish. We’ll update the Valiant with our location and progress before we inspect that ship.”

  “Rest, pull security,” West said.

  Carson got to the rocks, took a knee next to a boulder, and scanned down the northern approach with her optics. Negev was as dead as promised.

  “Chief, I’ll take Nunez to scout through the gap,” West said. “Get eyes on the ore ship.”

  She nodded and kept her eyes on the surroundings while Popov set up her laser dish. The device was little more than a foot-long tube she carried on her back, but with the push of a button, it unfurled into a dish with sharp prongs for its base. She stabbed it into the ground, then knelt next to it. The dish panned back and forth and then locked in place.

  “Got the ship,” Popov said. “They’re sending more images from orbit. No word from the Spirit.”

  “At least something’s going according to plan.” Carson was tapping out a brief summary report on her forearm screen when Nunez and West came running back through the gap.

  “Chief,” Nunez said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “you got to see this.”

  “I’m still pulling data,” Popov said.

  “Nunez, stay here,” West said. “Don’t want you to piss your suit.”

  “You saw that thing too!” Nunez stepped toward the gap, then grumbled and took Carson’s spot.

  Carson trotted after West and through the gap, wide enough for three at a time and with a floor of loose sand.

  West stopped near the exit and waved Carson forward. She crept around the bend and saw the ore carrier nestled in a slight depression, a gash a half-mile long trailing behind it in the ground.

  “To the left,” West said. “The mountain.”

  A mountain line ended a few miles away from the crashed ship. There, carved out of the very rock face, was an enormous alien bust, the mouth open in either agony or a cry for help, some of the lower jaw crumbled and lying in boulders at the base of the slope. The shape of the eyes, the blunted nose, skull flares over the ears…it almost looked like the malformed doughboys they’d encountered on Terra Nova. To either side of the carving were two more faces, both in agony.

  Carson took photos with her helmet and added them to her report. She sent it back to Popov.

  “Bring the team up once Popov’s got the data out.” Carson swallowed hard. “Mission continues.”

  “Roger.” West hurried off.

  Carson thought back to a family trip to Mount Rushmore before the Xaros invasion. The six faces carved into that mountain all had mounds of rock spoil at their base, even the most recent addition carved with methods more modern than the mid-twentieth-century stone carvers’. These faces were hundreds of feet high, and there was no sign of their construction; it was as if the mountain had molded itself.

  The eyes appeared to be looking down over the valley between the mountain and the crashed
ore hauler. Carson got the strangest feeling that the mountain was looking right at her, that somehow the planet knew right where she was and it was coming for her.

  “What, Nunez?” Popov said as she came through the gap. “You’re like a kid at Christmas and—holy shit.” Popov’s arms fell to her side as she looked at the mountain.

  “Mount Holy Shit…not a bad name,” Nunez said.

  “Saint preserve us,” Birch said, touching his chest where his cross lay beneath his armor.

  “Don’t act like you’ve never seen alien relics before,” West said. “All part and parcel of being a Pathfinder.”

  “We’re here for the ore ship,” Carson said, “to find the first colonists, not gawk at an artifact. Birch, get an eyeball up.”

  “Roger.” Birch tapped his wrist controls and the small drone shot from the carrier on his back.

  “Treat this environment as hostile. Let’s not get caught with our pants down,” Carson said.

  Carson watched the feed on her HUD as the Gremlin flew low over the terrain, approaching the wreck at just about eye level. Sensor icons appeared as the drone took multiple scans of the site, relaying the information back.

  “No life signs,” Birch reported, even though the rest of the team could read the information. “Hull and engines are at ambient temperature; she’s been down a while. Looks like the interior is exposed as well.”

  “Can’t see the underside,” West said, “but there’s no sign it was fired on. Engines look intact.”

  “Okay, Popov, Nunez, stay on overwatch.” Carson reached up and pulled her camo-clock on place. “The rest of you, ghost up and double-time it to the ship with me.”

  It wasn’t a straight approach. The team had to navigate some large hull fragments that had been thrown clear of the wreck in the explosion that had opened the ship to the elements. Carson stopped next to a body and nudged the head over with the tip of her boot. The outer desiccated layer came apart easily as the skull lolled to one side. The shape wasn’t human—the cranium was too long and there were bony nodules over the orbit of the eyes and where the ears would have been. The uniform matched the tatters the changed doughboys on Terra Nova wore.

  “Not our colonists,” Moretti said.

  “Doughboys can fly a spaceship?” Birch asked.

  “Not going to get our answers out here.” Carson hurried toward the crashed ship.

  They stacked up on either side of the jagged hole, catching their breath. Carson peered around the edge, switching on her carbine’s light. The beam cut through the darkness inside, revealing a short corridor covered with sand. A door at the far end stood cracked open.

  “Moretti, hold out here,” Carson said, rounding the edge and slowly entering the ship.

  The medic acknowledged her as Birch and West followed her down the corridor. Their boots left footprints in a light coat of dust clinging to the deck as they moved deeper into the ship. The trio paused at the partially open hatchway, trying to see through the crack in the door with their lights.

  A marker next to the double doors read LEVEL 3 – BAY ACCESS.

  “Give me a hand here, would ya?” Carson asked, racking her carbine into its magnetic clamps.

  She reached forward and pulled on one of the doors. The metal door groaned and Carson grunted with the strain until the door finally gave. Birch stepped up, going to work on the opposite door. After several moments of straining, they managed to create enough space that they wouldn’t have to squeeze through.

  “I never liked recovery operations,” Birch said, pulling his carbine free once more.

  “Here’s hoping there’s a whole lot of nothing waiting for us,” Carson said.

  Inside the double doors was the ore hauler’s main cargo bay. The powerful lights only partially piercing the darkness, the rest of the vast compartment remained shrouded.

  “Hold on, Chief,” Birch said. A second later, his Gremlin shot past them to zip through the black interior.

  Carson watched the lights move back and forth through the space, part of her wondering when the drone would be shot down by enemy ambushers. The images coming from the Gremlin’s sensor feed showed only bare metal walls. Every few feet, a new length of chain lay strewn across the deck, attached to an anchor point on the bulkhead. Something flashed on her display, then vanished.

  “Wait,” Carson said, putting a hand on Birch’s arm. “Back up; what was that?”

  The image turned and slowly backtracked its course. A second later, it stopped, sensors focused on the desiccated corpse.

  “Another doughboy,” West said.

  The image rotated around the alien’s remains for a few seconds, then took off along its original course. It passed over more short lengths of chain with thick cuffs. At the far end of the bay, it located several more of the same corpses, all in the same deteriorated condition as the first. As the drone finished its circuit of the bay, it found hundreds of more chains anchored to the bulkhead, all empty.

  “It was a slave ship,” Birch said.

  “But where’d they all go?” Carson asked. “And why did they bring the colonists all the way out here? And if this ship is empty…”

  “If it was full of humans when it crashed,” West went to a doughboy corpse and ran his foot over a smear of dry blood, “there’d be evidence. So it was empty. They must have unloaded their cargo nearby and crashed soon after takeoff. If this ship came down from orbit, we’d find tiny burnt pieces all over the place, not intact like this.”

  “We need to find the bridge,” West said. “We might be able to pull flight records. Like you said, they couldn’t possibly fit all the colonists in this thing. Even if they had four ships, it would have taken twenty, maybe thirty trips to ferry all those people here.”

  Nunez’s voice came over the IR. “Hey, Chief, we’ve got ourselves a development.”

  “Go,”

  “Heat plumes coming off Mount Nope. Started two minutes ago. All from the upper ridge line, not out of the mouth or eyes, because this is already weird enough.”

  “Looks like there’s our spot,” West said. “Birch, your drone smart enough to get to the bridge and access files?”

  “I can handle it on remote.” Bitch tapped the side of his helmet.

  “Then let’s get out of here,” Carson said.

  Five minutes later, the entire team stood near the prow of the ship, compacted and buried in the Negev soil. Carson looked at the mountain through her HUD’s infrared filter. Heat plumes, registering as red and orange and yellow fountains of color, rose out from the top of the alien sculpture. The waves of super-heated air flowed out of the mountain for a several minutes, and then would vanish completely for the same amount of time.

  “They’re venting waste heat,” Carson said, switching the infrared filter off.

  “Everyone remember the first briefings about Terra Nova when they opened the mission up for applications? I distinctly heard that the Qa’Resh promised that Terra Nova and this whole dwarf galaxy were uninhabited,” Popov said. “Why’d they sell us a load of crap?”

  Nunez rubbed his thumb against his carbine’s safety switch. “They wanted to keep us in the alliance after it almost sold us out to the Toth in the middle of the Ember War. Shame on us for believing them. Can’t hold them responsible anymore; the Qa’Resh vanished right after we wiped out the Xaros. Also we can’t go back home to kick their asses for lying. No refunds, I guess.”

  “Could it be these aliens showed up after the Qa’Resh surveyed the galaxy?” Birch said.

  “I don’t know,” Moretti said. “I don’t think that face up there was made in the last few years. It’s been there a long time.”

  “But who are they?” Popov asked. “And what the hell do they want? I hate all this mysterious shit.”

  “When we find the colonists, we’ll find the aliens, and just maybe, we’ll find some answers too,” Carson said. She ran a scan on the mountain face and found a deep seam between the faces. She sent a screen c
apture to her team.

  “Chief, did you just get a good idea?” Nunez asked. “Because I’m sensing the good idea fairy.”

  “You made the Firebase X-Ray climb in the Superstition Mountains outside of Phoenix,” Carson said. “This’ll be easy.”

  ****

  Carson jammed her fingers into a crack in the rock face and pulled herself higher. She pulled a spike attached to a metal wire and wedged it into the mountain. Tiny spikes dug into the rock and a green light flashed twice on the spike. She touched her belt and the safety line a few feet down came free and snapped back up. Below, her Pathfinders made the same climb. The drop to the bottom looked suitably lethal, even in Negev’s lighter gravity.

  “So you think that’s one of their presidents?” Popov asked as she climbed up.

  “Maybe it’s their God,” Nunez said.

  “It doesn’t matter who or what it is,” West said. “Whoever these bastards are, they have our people.”

  Nunez tested a grip on the rock and pulled away a thin hunk the size of a dinner plate. He gently set it back in place and found another hand hold. “So, what, we just going to knock and see if they invite us in?”

  “Should be easier than that. If they cared about security, there would be someone out here watching,” West said.

  Carson nodded. “Why bother with guards? An unsuited human sneaks out and they’ve got about two minutes to regret their decision before they suffocate and die.”

  The planet’s reduced gravity and the team’s powered armor made the climb considerably easier, but it still took effort. After an hour of climbing, Carson was taking deep labored breaths and her muscles ached. By the time they reached the top, everyone but Birch flopped over on the ground, exhausted.

  Popov rolled onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow. “Come to Terra Nova, my parents said. It’ll be great, they said. White picket fences and babies.”

  “Well, that was your first mistake, Cherry,” Nunez said. “You trusted a salesman. Didn’t you learn your lesson after joining the military? Those sweet-talking sons of a gun will say damn near anything to get you to sign on the dotted line.”