Noble took another step back, until his spine was dangerously close to the wall of the orb. He held up a hand and moved his head from side to side as the sharp tip spun toward his mouth.
“No,” he mumbled, rearing his head back. “Please… please no.”
The needle jabbed his lips, numbing them instantly. He reached up to swat it away. The multi-dimensional being pulled it back, replaced the wall, and then vanished from view, leaving Noble standing there in shock.
He tried to speak, and then he tried to scream, but no sounds could escape his mouth. There was just a muffled strangle reverberating in his throat. He fell to his knees, reaching up to touch his swollen lips. They were clamped shut.
***
It didn’t take long to load one of the eight-wheeled armored Rhinos. Several of the Rhinos had been destroyed in the Organic attack on the Sunspot, and many had scars from where shrapnel had blasted against them. But the vehicles were built tough. A few scratches, a busted wheel or two, and even a shard of spaceship hull through an armor plate, wasn’t going to stop a Rhino. Still, Diego wondered if they could withstand a spider or a Sentinel. He hoped they wouldn’t have to find out.
The interior of the Rhino was especially spacious with only Diego, Ort, and Bouma in the vehicle. Diego was glad he’d convinced Emanuel to stay. This wasn’t a place for scientists to play hero. They had brought a portable RVAMP and enough pulse rifle rounds and EMP grenades for a platoon. That was one benefit of being a small crew on the huge Sunspot.
“You know what?” Ort broke the silence between them. “This might be the first time I actually feel like we’re fully equipped to engage the Organics.”
“Equipped or not, I’d rather we didn’t see a single one of them,” Diego said from the driver’s seat. “Those blue bastards are annoying as hell even when you’ve got an RVAMP and EMP grenades.”
Diego wanted to sigh. He thought about the time he would’ve spent scouting the area and identifying any potential threats. He hated going in blind to a mission. It was just like when he and Sergeant Harrington had volunteered to go with that squad into the Chinese sub back on Earth. They’d gone in with no idea of what they were about to face, holding on to the tenuous hope that they’d find human survivors. But the only survivors that had come back from that mission were him and a few others who had managed to escape demise at the claws of hungry spiders. They’d lost half their search and rescue party, with nothing to show for it.
The Rhino crawled over the barren landscape. Jagged red rocks pushed up all over from the rust-colored dirt like the claws of some giant Sentinel yearning to free itself from the planet.
They climbed and dipped down hill after hill, carefully crawling toward the location Sonya had told them to mark on their map. Over rocks and small ditches they went.
The landscape looked just as Diego had always imagined it. Vast, dry, and the color of rust. Out here it wasn’t as terraformed as the patches they’d seen from space. The sky, though, looked slightly different than Earth’s. There was a purple hue to it, almost as if it was the tail end of a sunset.
“What’s the atmo here, Sonya?” Diego asked.
“Oxygen and atmosphere levels are higher than noted in NTC reports from a year ago,” Sonya reported. “Still, oxygen levels are sub one percent. Air density is approximately three percent of Earth’s.”
It wasn’t much, but it was something. The sparse terraforming was having an effect. That might mean humanity was actually finding a foothold on this planet. If only the Organics didn’t have their claws in it first.
“Any contacts?” Diego asked.
“So far, I do not detect any lifeforms,” Sonya said. “However, it is difficult for me to determine with complete certainty that there are no lifeforms present at our destination. The shielding provided by the landscape and the ship’s radio defenses making such determinations exceedingly difficult.”
“Understood,” Diego replied. “Tell us as soon as you spot something.”
They continued across the alien terrain, eyes flitting for hostiles. Stars studded the sky above them. Diego waited for one of those stars to come careening down. Surely some of those jewels in the sky were the Organic ships? They were probably waiting up there, distributed around the planet like vultures, ready to plummet down and tear apart the carrion. Each time he thought he saw something move, his heart picked up in tempo and his grip tightened around his rifle.
Despite Sonya’s reassurances, Diego found trusting the AI difficult. He preferred not to rely solely on computers and electronic sensors. Relying on his own senses and intuition had served him well over the years. It had kept him alive.
He scanned the horizon, looking for signs of Organics. A dark column that looked like a cloud rolled across the horizon. Diego squinted for a better view. “Sonya, what is that at our five o’clock?”
“I’m detecting a dust storm,” she said. “However, it is not currently headed in our direction. Risk assessments indicate that it is not even a mild threat to our current mission. The probability does exist that it might intersect with our path, but it is unlikely.”
“Unlikely,” Diego muttered. He didn’t like that there was even a small chance it might hit them. Still he couldn’t help but think that the ominous dust clouds billowing across the horizon were a sign of things to come.
“Still don’t like seeing them,” Ort grumbled.
“Me either,” Bouma said. “The dust storms were bad enough on Earth. You can ask Sophie about the one that nearly crashed her helo before she even got to Cheyenne Mountain. I can’t imagine what this one would be like.”
“In my book, Mars’s storms are like Organics,” Diego said. “Better left not experienced.”
The wind pelted them with gravel and dirt as they continued driving, the vehicle navigating the rugged terrain at a rapid pace. He kept his eye on the storm crossing the plains in the distance.
“You are two point four kilometers from the crash site,” Sonya reported after several quiet minutes. “The ship will soon be visible.”
The Rhino climbed a hill crowned with jagged boulders. Bouma leaned forward in his seat, as if that would hold them steady. Beyond the boulders, they spotted a large valley. Huge gouges were dug into the dirt, leading to the crashed biosphere ship.
And it wasn’t alone.
There were times Diego had doubted his faith. Since the Organics had invaded Earth, there wasn’t a single day he didn’t wonder if God was just a fairytale humans told themselves to make peace with their inevitable deaths. All the Sunday Masses and NTC chaplains’ sermons he had attended never mentioned anything about giant monsters descending on Earth from the stars.
Other times, he thought maybe he was already dead. Maybe God did exist, and so did Heaven and Hell. Because right now, he was pretty sure he was in Hell.
“Holy shit,” Ort said over the suit’s comms.
“Ain’t nothing holy about it.” Diego stood and pressed one hand against the windshield.
The biosphere ship they’d tracked down looked as if it had skidded across the landscape. It looked mostly intact, except for a few huge singe marks that marred its stern. Many of the windows had been blown out near those blackened areas, but otherwise it was in one piece.
The same couldn’t be said for the multitude of other ships in the area. They too had half-buried themselves in this spaceship graveyard. Most were just pieces of broken hull, nothing but metal ribbing, like the charred skeletons from a pod of gigantic whales.
“A graveyard,” Bouma said quietly.
“Wonder what happened to them,” Ort murmured.
Diego adjusted his grip on his rifle. “Let’s go find out.”
***
Athena thought about returning to look for Walker’s body, but she knew by now there wouldn’t be much, if anything, left of him. The spiders never wasted anything.
She needed to keep her mind on moving forward. If Alexia was correct, they might have transportation to
a military installation where other survivors were holed up.
A dangerous emotion crept up on her as she walked. Hope was something she tried not to feel, something she tried her best to keep suppressed.
For the first time in weeks, she embraced the emotion. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Perhaps this was what she needed to keep things going?
She brought up her pulse rifle to scope the skyline for drones or alien ships.
Lowering her rifle, she craned her helmet to look over the city one last time. She had managed to evade the spiders after connecting with Alexia, but the beasts were still out there.
Hunting.
Movement flashed across the exterior of a building a few blocks into the city. Several of the spiders were clambering across the white walls between the window frames.
She crouched out of sight and scanned the dry seabed in front of her once more. The rolling tan dunes and blue sky revealed no sign of hostiles.
“Goodbye, Walker,” she whispered. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the monsters still feeding on Walker’s remains.
Athena suppressed the thought and set off down the beach. There were four miles of sand between herself and the GOA, all of which would leave her exposed. At a jog, it would take her just under forty minutes in the armored suit. She spotted the bones of the whale carcass she had sheltered in with Walker, but aside from that, there wasn’t much.
The sun was already going down, a harsh reminder that the aliens that had killed Corporal Marlin were out there somewhere. With only an hour or so of sunlight left, she couldn’t waste time.
Four miles. That’s all you have to do, she reminded herself.
She pushed her legs from a jog to a run. Sweat prickled across her shoulders and down her back, her skin sticking to the membrane under the armor. Even with the coolant circulating through the suit, she was burning up. The filtered air in her helmet was getting stale and gritty, and each steamy breath irritated her overexerted lungs.
Her eyes flitted from the skyline to her HUD, scanning for hostiles and the data rolling across the display in the upper right-hand corner. The temperature was starting to drop, now that the sun was going down, but it was still up at one hundred and eighteen degrees.
Wind gusted across the plateau of sand, rustling the surface and exposing the bones of fish and empty shells of crabs and other crustaceans.
Athena used her tongue to pull the straw in her helmet to her lips. She took a sip, the cool liquid soothing her dry throat. The heat was starting to make her lightheaded. The adrenaline from seeing Walker die and hiding from the spiders had long since waned, leaving her with little energy. She forced her boots forward.
The air undulated from the heat, filling the horizon with the facade of movement. The mirage made it difficult to see if anything was moving beyond the tan-colored terrain. She managed to run the first two miles without stopping to rest, but slowed at the halfway point to sip more water and crouch next to a cluster of large rocks.
The boulders provided some shelter from the fading sun. She rested her back against the smooth rock to catch her breath. Instead of breathing through her nostrils, she took air through her mouth. The heat wasn’t as bad on her throat as it was her sensitive nose.
After a few seconds of rest, she scoped the cracked seabed between her position and that of the GOA with her pulse rifle. There was no sign of life. Her HUD confirmed the sky was clear, so she continued onward at a jog. The membrane in her suit clung to her sweaty flesh now, making it more challenging to move.
She thought of her crew back in the submarine, and anticipated their questions. Everyone would want to know what happened to Walker. How he died. Why he died. What the plan was.
All she wanted to do was climb into her bunk and close her eyes.
But leaders didn’t get to rest.
She focused back on the stretch of sand on the other side of a rolling hill. She remembered this area from a previous scouting mission. Ravines snaked across the terrain here. Walker and she had stumbled upon it three weeks ago by accident when returning to the GOA.
Athena changed direction, moving south past the canyons. They were deep enough the sun didn’t penetrate the bottom. From an aerial view, she imagined they looked like yawning, bloody slash marks on flesh, with their red edges.
Thoughts of the beasts that might dwell in those shadows kept her far from the edges of the gorges. Her eyes roved over the landscape out of habit, but she had to continue pushing herself to run. Every movement was uncomfortable now. Her muscles were stretched to the limit, and her lungs were on fire.
Her jog devolved into more of a staggering hobble, and she cradled her rifle over her chest, doing her best not to let it clank against the armor. She hadn’t gone far beyond the gorges when she heard the unmistakable rumble of an Organic spaceship.
Instinct forced her to the ground, and she looked skyward.
Not a drone this time.
A two-winged aircraft with a dorsal fin cut over the horizon like a barracuda. It veered toward Los Angeles, probably to check out reports from the aliens about her and Walker. She hadn’t seen one of these aircraft for weeks, and it was bad news for her.
If she was spotted, she knew, the pilot wouldn’t capture her. It would kill her in a volley of laser fire. There wouldn’t be anything left for her crew to find if that happened.
Keeping low to the ground, she gazed longingly in the direction of the GOA. She was less than half a mile away, but there was no way she would make it. Besides, she didn’t want to lead the aliens to their hideout. Her only chance was to return to the ravines and take shelter there until the ship was gone.
A moment later, she was up on her feet and running toward the deep cuts in the seabed. She focused on the closest ravine, which appeared about as wide as a one-lane road. The roar of the alien ship droned on, and she snuck a glance to see it circling Los Angeles, scanning for targets.
She wasn’t sure how far the pilots could see, or what type of scanning equipment they had, but she had a feeling it would snag her eventually. She had to get out of the open.
A glance over her shoulder showed the fighter was already changing course. The adrenaline returned, warming her veins and nerves as she sprinted toward the ravine ahead. The rumble of the aircraft grew louder and louder with every step she took, until the very ground beneath her feet was shaking.
It felt like it was almost on her now.
She clicked the rifle into its slot at her back, and prepared to jump into the gorge. It wasn’t as wide as the others, maybe twelve feet across, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t deep. If she fell all the way to the bottom, she would break a bone. Perhaps several. A broken bone out here would be worse than getting vaporized by the lasers. At least those would kill her instantly.
She waited until she was a few steps away before launching herself into the air. The craggy, brown far wall reached out to meet her as she plummeted. She slammed against the rock, her boots landing on a rocky shelf. Her right hand grappled for purchase and her left slid down the jagged rock, which sliced into her glove.
Another swipe with her right hand and she managed to find a handhold, relief washing through after finding purchase. Panting and hugging the wall, she slowly looked down at the outline of the floor, some fifty or sixty feet below.
The alien fighter passed overhead, stirring the sand above into a vortex that rained down into the gorge and peppered her with grit and tiny rocks. She held her position until she heard the craft coming in for another pass.
The thump, thump of laser fire pounded the seabed above her, shaking away hunks of rock and sand all around her. The blasts hit the ground somewhere above her, several cutting through the air right above the ravine, sizzling and tossing up sand.
Her boots were planted firmly on a rocky shelf and she had a good grip on a deposit of jutting rock, but if any of it gave way, she would plunge a hell of a long way down.
She searched for a way to climb deeper.
As the fighter circled for another pass, she began moving, carefully negotiating the wall.
The rays of penetrating sunlight weakened with every new foot and handhold she found. She descended into the darkness as the aircraft came in for a second pass. Laser fire pounded the seabed with such force that a huge section of rock and sand fell away and smashed to the ground below. Twisting her body, she avoided the rockslide with mere inches to spare.
She was over halfway down when the fighter came in yet another time, peppering the ground above. More grit and rocks rained down, covering her in dust and sand.
When she was just ten feet from the bottom, she jumped the rest of the way. Her boots crunched into the sand, and she rolled. Recovering, she grabbed her pulse rifle and crouched down to look at whatever she had landed on.
The air seized in her lungs, and fresh adrenaline charged through her vessels. The floor wasn’t sand or rock. It was a pile of bones. Mostly small fish and the shells of crustaceans, but there were several larger sea creatures. Dozens of shark skeletons lay over in the corner.
Seeing remains like this wasn’t abnormal, but seeing them dragged together like this was highly unusual. Something had killed these creatures and feasted on them in the early days of the invasion, leaving their bones in the once underwater grave.
She was in the den of some aquatic alien apex predator.
Hiding in one of their nests, even if abandoned, terrified her to the core. Her blood chilled at the memories of the aquatic aliens she had seen from inside the submarine. Had this been one of those?
She swallowed as the fighter passed overhead again. The pilot had stopped firing the laser, but apparently continued to search for her. Breathing heavily, she lay down on the bones, her heart thundering. The sun retreated beyond the lip of the gorge, leaving darkness to cover the land.
Stars already pinpricked the sky.
She had to get out of there and back to the GOA.
Her opportunity finally came a few minutes later, when the roar of the fighter diminished into a dull rumble, and then quiet.
Orbs IV_Exodus_A Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Survival Thriller Page 6
