by JE Gurley
Ivers grunted.
“Okay. Send out an update that we’re landing at Station K124 to search for survivors.”
“Add this priority code,” Ivers said, “Delta Fox Charlie Arrowhead, Ivers, C.J., 1662541.”
Dax cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”
“The call sign for Hostile Alien Contact. Maybe it will light a fire under their ass.”
“Add it,” he told Romeo.
The descent into Loki’s atmosphere was worse than Dax remembered. The raging upper-level winds buffeted the ship like a leaf in a summer gale, slamming the craft from side to side or grabbing it by the nose and twisting it until the tail dropped. Dax fought the controls to keep the craft right side up, losing altitude as fast as he dared. The seat’s restraining harness bit into his shoulder, as the craft bucked and heaved. He kept one eye on the scanners to avoid the worst microbursts. He longed to plug in his earbuds and listen to some blues to ease the tension, but he needed to keep an ear open as Andy called out wind vectors and altitudes. The five-minute descent seemed like thirty, as he worked his hands to reduce the cramps from gripping the controls.
Once they reached the lower atmosphere, the ride became smoother, but navigating around rising thermals still required a hands-on approach. He didn’t trust the automatic pilot’s computations as much as he did his instincts. It was like dodging trees in a forest at night while running full speed. Dust thrown up by the trailing edge of the storm pelted the view screen and the extended airfoils, sounding like hail.
“This is going to screw up my new paint job,” he joked.
At 2,000 meters, he reduced power to slow the ship and followed a deep, winding canyon to the outpost. The control yoke picked up a slight vibration. He pushed the yoke forward slightly for a little added power. The vibration vanished.
“Anything from the station?” Dax asked Romeo.
“I’m picking up a faint ground signal between us and the station. It sounds like landing coordinates.”
“That would be ‘KB,’ the outpost research station about 2,000 clicks from K124,” Ivers said. “There are usually two scientists there on rotation.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dax said. “I’ve never been there, but I suppose we should set down there first and pick them up. Luigi, send them a message as soon as we’re close enough for them to receive.”
Ivers objected. “They can wait. We need to reach K124 ASAP.”
“I’m not leaving two people waiting in the middle of nowhere. They might have some useful intel, and I don’t like backtracking.”
“They wouldn’t know anything. We …”
Dax stopped him. “My ship, my rules.” He didn’t know if saving two lives could ever make up for wasting Nate’s, but Nate would insist he do it.
Ivers scowled at him but said nothing. Dax tried to suppress a smile at the sergeant’s restraint.
“I got through,” Romeo said, tapping his earphone. Then, he frowned. “They have a lot of questions.”
“Don’t waste time explaining. Inform them we’re dropping down to pick them up and to be ready; then, cut communications.”
Ahead, Dax spotted the small white dome of KB sitting on the edge of the two-kilometers-deep canyon they had been following, nestled into a small cleft in the reddish-brown bluff to block the frequent desert winds. Landing Fortune’s Luck would be tricky in a space barely wide enough to accommodate the station’s small shuttle, but he did not like the idea of landing on a more open mesa and hiking in, not with the possibility of more monsters.
“Use the thrusters to keep her tail pointed away from the rim of the canyon while I set her down,” he told Andy. “I don’t want her to slide over the edge.”
Ivers leaned forward in his seat intent on watching the landing. Dax wondered if the sergeant had any piloting experience, but then figured a good Marine sergeant would be a Jack-of-all trades. Dax took a deep breath and released it slowly as he powered down the engines. The ship settled easily onto the ledge and remained stationary. He turned to Ivers.
“I want you to come with me in case those things made it this far.”
“We might not have to go anywhere. Look.” Ivers pointed out the forward view screen to a man and a woman exiting the station. The woman raced toward the ship. The man followed at a more leisurely pace.
Romeo looked out the viewport and smiled. “She’s hot.”
“Keep it in your pants, Romeo,” Dax said.
Dax went to meet them at the airlock. There was no need to cycle through the lock, so he opened both the outer and inner doors. He sealed the outer door as soon as they were both inside. He noted the woman went to Ivers first, drawn by his uniform.
“What happened at K?” she asked. “We haven’t had any word from them in two days.”
Dax answered her question even though she had directed it at Ivers. “We don’t know. They’re not answering.”
She ignored Dax. “You were on the Abraxas?” she asked of Ivers.
He nodded.
“Are they really …?”
“Dead? Yes, all of them.”
She paled visibly and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t understand.”
The man seemed to know Dax was the ship’s captain. He offered his hand. Dax recognized him because of his glasses, an oddity in an age of easy eye corrective procedures, but couldn’t recall his name. “I’m Myles Benson,” the man prompted, “climatologist. This is Cici Adar, xenobiologist. Thank you for coming. As you might have guessed, we are understandably curious and somewhat apprehensive about what has happened to our friends.”
Dax shook his hand. “Later. Grab a seat and strap in. We’re lifting off in one minute.”
“But you can’t,” Cici objected. “Our notes. Our equipment. You’ll have to wait a few minutes while we retrieve them.”
“We’re not waiting for anything. Now, strap in.”
“I refuse –”
Dax hit the panel, sealing the inner airlock door. “Take off will be rough. If I were you, I would find a seat.” He nodded to her wrist comp. “I suggest you start downloading everything you can before we get out of range.”
She glared at him but began frantically punching at her wrist comp. Dax ignored her, brushed past her, and turned to head to the bridge.
“Come on, Cici,” Myles said, leading her to the wardroom. “We can pick up the equipment later.”
He met Tish in the corridor, frowning at him. She had overheard the conversation. “That could have gone smoother,” she said, following him to the bridge.
Dax didn’t need a lecture from her on his lack of social skills. Every minute on the ground made him nervous. “I don’t have time for hysterics.”
Tish barked a short, harsh laugh of derision. “She wasn’t hysterical; she was pissed. You do that to people, you know.”
“It comes with the job. Go make sure she doesn’t bounce around my ship and damage anything. Thirty seconds to lift off.”
He strapped into his seat, hoping everyone else had settled in. Taking off would be riskier than landing. If he went straight up hard and fast, the cross winds rising from the canyon could slam the ship into the bluff. If he lifted off too slowly, the ship could slide over the edge of the cliff and flip over. Ivers slipped into the seat behind him.
“Hold onto your lunch, Sergeant,” he warned. “Andy, be ready to retract the landing gear as soon as we clear the surface.”
The safest way to lift off was the most dangerous, but he trusted his engines and his instincts. He powered up the vertical thrusters and slid the ship over the cliff. It dropped like a rock. The ground rushed up to meet them at a dizzying rate. The ship’s artificial gravity couldn’t compensate for the nosedive. The pressure pressed Dax back into his seat. He forced his arm forward and pushed the main engines to full throttle. The narrow airfoils bit into the air, turning the falling craft into an awkward glider. The nose rose reluctantly. He could almost hear Ivers’ teeth grinding.
&n
bsp; One-hundred-sixty meters from the ground, the ship leveled off and shot down the canyon, raising a trailing cloud of dust. The walls of the narrow canyon shot by much closer than Dax had anticipated. He glanced at Andy, who had his eyes closed, and grinned. He lifted the ship until it cleared the canyon rim before cutting the vertical thrusters. The maneuver burned a lot of fuel, but it was better than scraping Fortune’s Luck’s sides against the bluff or winding up a pile of smoking wreckage at the bottom of the canyon. Besides, he wanted to give Ivers a ride to remember.
“You’re one crazy son of a bitch,” Ivers said, but his voice held a note of respect.
“Sometimes you have to make gravity work for you.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “I didn’t hear any screaming from our passengers. I guess they found a seat.”
Ivers unharnessed and left the bridge to speak with Cici Adar and Myles Benson. Dax was glad to let him inform the pair about the creatures unearthed at K124. They might believe a Marine sergeant, whereas they would probably just call him crazy.
“Still nothing from the station?” he asked Romeo, who still appeared a little queasy from the dramatic lift-off. Beads of sweat from his forehead rolled unchecked down his thin cheeks.
“Uh-uh. Not a thing, not even a homing beacon.”
Dax frowned. That meant the station had no power. Evening had fallen at the station, which would complicate any rescue operation. The knot in the pit of his stomach balled tighter, reminding him of his doubt that anyone had survived. It had been seventy-two hours since the UNN Abraxas had left Loki, fifty-six since anyone had heard from the station. Given the ferocity of the creature that he had seen aboard the Abraxas and the amount of damage to the ship, the alien ruins down in the lava tubes would have become a slaughterhouse.
He understood Ivers’ need to kill the creatures, though he considered it a foolhardy move. They could simply wait for a Navy ship to arrive within the week and nuke the entire planet if necessary. He didn’t see what a single Marine could do but die horribly, a fate he personally strove to avoid.
Dax turned as Cici Adar burst onto the bridge. What now? He prepared for an argument.
“Captain, I apologize for my earlier rude behavior.” Dax unclenched his jaw in surprise. “Sergeant Ivers explained the situation to me.”
He wondered what Ivers had told her to produce such a dramatic change in her demeanor. He relaxed. “No problem. I just didn’t have time for conversation.”
“The sergeant’s description of the creatures defies logic. They cannot be native to this world.”
“Wherever they came from, Doctor Adar, they’ve been hibernating down in those tunnels a long time. Why did it take so long to find them?”
“Cici, please,” she offered. “There are too many doctors at K124.” She continued, “It’s like a maze down there. Lava tubes run in every direction both vertically and horizontally. It looks as if the Huresh deliberately sealed certain tunnels as they abandoned them. The peculiar thing is that they abandoned them from the surface downward, as if …”
“As if they were trying to keep something out. It looks like they failed.”
“Doctor Rathiri was overseeing the excavation of a new level when I left, Level 5. The Huresh were a technologically advanced society. At the peak of their civilization, they had over twenty cities scattered across the world; not many, I grant you, but Loki is, after all, a moon and has limited natural resources.” To Dax, she sounded as if she were apologizing for the Huresh’s failure to survive. “They made use of advanced metal alloys and solar energy. Then, something drove them underground. We had believed the cause was some kind of global catastrophe, but now … Their sub-surface dwellings became more primitive the deeper we went, but they constructed many spaces with metal rooms set into the native rock. We thought they might serve a religious purpose, but with these creatures … I suspect now that they were sanctuaries. My colleagues could be there.”
“What kind of weapons did the station personnel have?”
Cici looked at him aghast. Seizing upon his use of the past tense, she chided, “Did? Don’t you mean does? We have no weapons. We are a scientific expedition. There are no living creatures on this world. We did not think we would have need of weapons. We considered our biggest threat someone becoming mentally unbalanced due to the isolation getting their hands on a weapon.”
Dax shook his head. He couldn’t understand people who thought not having weapons somehow kept them safer, as if knives or rocks wouldn’t serve nicely as killing implements in a pinch. He had never shot anyone, but he damned well had rather kill someone shooting at him than die over a misguided principle.
“Did the station have vehicles, I mean besides the shuttle? I remember seeing a couple of ATVs last time I was there. In fact, spare tires are part of the cargo I’m delivering.”
“There are two tracked vans for extended outings and four smaller ATVs.” Her eyes lit up with hope. “Do you think they might have escaped?” She slumped her shoulders and looked crestfallen. “No, the vans have radios. They could have contacted us even if they did not have the range to contact your ship.”
“No use speculating yourself into a tizzy. We’ll be there in half an hour and see for ourselves.”
She reached out, touched his shoulder, and grinned. “Captain, I don’t think I have ever been in a tizzy, but I am worried about my friends.”
He reminded himself that although he barely knew them from his irregular visits lasting two days at most, she had lived among them for almost a year. To him, they were just faces he could scarcely recall. To her, they were friends and colleagues.
“If they’re alive, we’ll bring them home.”
“If?” she repeated.
He took a good look at her for the first time. Slim with large breasts, long auburn hair, and green eyes, she would have been attractive anywhere. On a small outpost twenty light years from Earth, she would have been Queen of the Ball. It was too bad she hadn’t transferred to Loki on the Luck. Five weeks aboard ship would have been time to get to know her better, but the personnel preferred ships with a little more luxury than the Luck could provide.
“We can hope,” he said. That was as much commitment he was willing to make on their survival.
He was still giving her the once-over when Tish appeared at the bridge door. She stopped when she saw Cici’s hand resting on Dax’s shoulder. Her face clouded briefly, but she quickly shrugged it off. Dax had never seen her jealous and hoped the incident didn’t cause a rift between them. Cici was an extraordinarily good-looking woman, but he shied away from intellectuals. He preferred women who could handle the rigors of life in a cargo ship, like Tish, and Tish was far from a slouch in the brains department. Since they had become sexual partners, he had followed a ‘look-but-don’t-touch’ policy with other women that seemed acceptable to her, or at least she had not overtly dissuaded him. Even after two years, he still had trouble reading her.
“Are you really going to allow the sergeant to go down into the tunnels alone?” Cici asked.
“I don’t think I can stop him. Those military types don’t put much store in civilian advice. Besides, we would only get in the way of his monster hunt.”
Cici backed away a step and stared at Dax. “I just told you my friends could be hiding in one of the sealed rooms down there. We have to find them.”
“Look, that thing ripped through a frigate’s cargo hatch. If one attacks my ship, we’re stuck here. If your people aren’t where we can get to them quickly, we can’t wait. The longer we’re on the surface, the more danger we’re in.”
“Coward!” she flung at him.
Her calling him a coward stung, but not enough to change his mind. “I may be, but I won’t face those creatures with a useless laser rifle, not for people who are dead already.”
“You don’t know that,” she snapped.
Dax could see it was time for the harsh truth. “Face the facts. The moment those two creatures came out of hibernati
on, your friends were dead.”
“You don’t know that they did come out of hibernation. We don’t know what awakened the two creatures on the Abraxas.”
“True, but we’ve had no contact with the station for three days,” he pointed out. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“They have no power. It could be a problem with the solar array.”
“They have a backup generator. They also have a shuttle. No, there’s only one reason for going dark; they’re dead.”
Cici sobbed and ran from the bridge.
Tish had watched the exchange. She shook her head. “You were pretty hard on her, Dax.”
“She needs to face reality.”
“You know, sometimes you can be a real bastard.”
“It comes with the captain’s chair. My ship, my crew, my client – that’s the proper pecking order; the one that keeps us in business. Everything else is a distant fourth. Without Fortune’s Luck, we’re ground-pounders. In this case, that would make us monster chow.” He didn’t know why he bothered explaining. He usually didn’t. They were crew and followed orders. He accepted their input on matters, but the final decision had always been his. Maybe it was because Cici had called him a coward, and Tish looked as though she believed her.
“Look, I’m not completely heartless; I agreed to attempt a rescue, but I am practical. You witnessed an entire U.N. Navy frigate and its slaughtered crew vaporized because of two of those creatures. I needn’t remind you that Nate was on that ship as well. We know the research personnel down there found at least two more. What if there are dozens? Four of the things didn’t drive the Lokians underground. They could be prowling the surface like a pack of stray dogs. Ivers is a grunt – point him at the enemy and stand back, but he’s in way over his head. He’s all GI Joe Gung Ho for revenge, acting on instinct, not rational thought. I won’t let him take us down with him. We drop down, do a quick search of the station, and wait for the Navy to arrive. Let them do the dirty work.”
She shook her head. “I used to respect you. I thought you were hard because you thought it brought you respect – the tough cargo captain image. Now …”
