by Craig Allen
Wallace pointed at the hopper. “Everyone in now!”
“Move, Doc.” Deveau pushed Cody while Bodin pulled him inside the hopper. Anne was already inside, sitting in the corner. The tip of her weapon shook as she swept it across the launch bay.
Sonja jumped into the hopper, storming past everyone toward the cockpit. The controls lit up as soon as she sat in the pilot’s seat. Like an expert, she activated systems. The docking impellers roared to life. Kicked up by the gravity waves that would thrust the hopper forward, water sprayed across the repair bay.
Wallace reached for the nearby controls, and the rear door slammed shut. “Get ready to bounce it, Gunny.”
Sonja grabbed the stick next to her. The command console lit up, showing a myriad of controls that only confused Cody. Most shined blue or green, but a handful were red.
“Shit.” Sonja ran her hands over the red holo-controls. They just flashed a brighter and angrier red at her. “Shit, shit.”
Bodin stuck his head into the cockpit. “There a problem, Gunny?”
“The clamps are down.” Sonja continued to run her fingers over the controls in different patterns. They flashed red in response. “I can’t unlock them, and I can’t blow them.”
“What?” Anne pushed past Bodin and stared at the controls. “I unlocked them. Goddamn it, they should be unlocked.”
Deveau glared at her. “Well, they’re not now, Private.”
“What the hell do we do now?” Jim asked.
“Somebody’s got to unlock the clamps manually.” Salyard pointed outside. “Somebody has to go out there to do it.”
Wallace called toward the cockpit. “Keep a hand on that throttle, Sergeant.” He went to the rear door.
Sonja turned. “Sir, you did see what was out there, didn’t you?”
“Just get ready to bounce it.” Wallace ran his fingers through the controls, and the door flew open. “It won’t take long.”
“Commander,” Deveau said, “I think you should let someone else—”
Wallace dropped into the water before Deveau could say more. A mad thrashing greeted him as dart creatures continued to fill the launch bay. Wallace didn’t hesitate. He fired his pistol, chopping up the water and everything in it. The creatures scurried away, climbing on top of the other hoppers in the bay.
Deveau and Jim leaned out of the rear door. One group of creatures dropped from a hopper and hurried toward them. The men pointed their rifles at them, and immediately the dart creatures squirmed away to hide behind the other hoppers.
Deveau scanned the area with his rifle. “It’s almost like they know what coil rifles are now.”
Bodin shook his head. “How? They’ve never seen one before.”
“Sergeant, look at them.” Salyard pointed at the creatures darting back and forth, peering at them from the sides of the hopper, only to dart back whenever one of them pointed a gun at them. “Jesus, they know. They learned.”
Wallace came back seconds later. “Explosive bolts activated. We got five seconds. Gunny, when they go off, you—”
Wallace had one foot inside the hopper when two dart creatures burst up from the water, wrapping themselves around Deveau’s and Jim’s rifles and jabbing their beaks into the men’s hands. Deveau swore as he shook the rifle. Jim released the handguard on his rifle and began knocking them away. For a crucial two seconds, the men were distracted.
Dozens more black shapes jumped from the water, their sharp beaks piercing Wallace’s body. His scream was cut off when a half dozen darts punctured his chest and his lungs. Blood sprayed from his mouth.
Jim and Deveau tugged at him, but the dart creatures wanted the commander badly. Dozens more appeared, weighing Wallace down, puncturing him over and over. Four leaped from Wallace and landed on Jim’s and Deveau’s wrists, jamming their beaks deep into flesh. Both men jumped back at the sudden pain, releasing Wallace. The commander’s writhing body fell back into the water. Darts from every part of the launch bay dived into the melee, swarming Wallace’s body.
A muffled thump vibrated the hopper. Water plumed in front of the rear exit as the main impellers came online. Darts scurried in all directions, pulling pieces of the commander with them. For a very brief moment, they scattered, but quickly returned to Wallace as he flailed in the water, covering every centimeter of him.
Anne rushed forward and punched the door controls. The door slammed, locking itself in place. The hopper hissed as it pressurized.
Bodin headed for the cockpit. “Bounce it, Gunny!”
Cody nearly fell as the hopper lurched forward. Deveau grabbed him before he hit the deck. He pointed at one of the chairs lining the hopper interior. “Grab a seat, Doc.”
The forward door opened and a wall of water enveloped the canopy, rapidly filling the repair bay. The hopper pushed forward through the water.
Sonja looked up at Bodin as he entered the cockpit. “Commander?”
He shook his head before taking the co-pilot’s seat. Sonja turned forward again, focusing on the controls. Her expression in the canopy reflection remained neutral as control lights danced across her face.
“Oh, Jesus,” Anne said. “The commander… h-he’s…”
“Hold it together, Private.” Deveau placed his weapon in a receptacle in the wall. A mechanism grabbed and secured his weapon inside a compartment while he took his seat.
Cody sat next to Anne. The straps wrapped around him automatically, conforming to his body and holding him firmly in place.
Anne breathed heavily. “Oh, God. What do we—”
“He said hold it together, kid.” Jim set his weapon in the same receptacle and sat next to Deveau. “We deal with it later. Right now, we survive.”
Cody put a hand on her forearm. “Stay with us, okay?”
She stared at him for a moment then gave him a quick nod. She was new to all of this, like Cody, but she had training Cody didn’t. But even though she had that edge, she was still terrified. He didn’t blame her in the least.
The launch tube guide lights rushed past the canopy. A graphic of the tube and its path hovered before Sonja. A white dot in the center of the hologram showed the hopper was close to the tube’s end. Cody interfaced with the hopper’s external optic, projecting the image inside his eye. Beyond the open outer hatch lay the blackness of an alien ocean.
“Here we go.” Sonja slid her fingers up the virtual throttle. Nothing happened.
Bodin’s voice betrayed a bit of fear. “Gunny?”
“Shit.” Sonja played with the throttle, cycling it back and forth. The hopper vibrated in response, but it didn’t budge. “We’re hung up.”
Deveau leaned forward in his seat and called out. “Gunny, I think we should get out of here.”
“No shit, Corporal. Your suggestion is duly noted.” Sonja brought up the exterior view on a monitor between her and Bodin. The three-dimensional image showed the aft of the hopper.
Cody connected to the view. His blood ran cold. Metallic plates gleamed in the hopper’s tracking lights. In unison, the plates tilted back and forth. Behind the plates, a blue-black shape undulated in the water. Sonja changed the monitor’s view to the underside of the hopper. The creature had wrapped a tentacle around a landing strut. The hopper jolted as the creature tried to pull the ship back into the launch bay.
The creature’s large frill ballooned and stretched outward over the hopper. Blackness filled the optic view. The hull groaned and popped. A few seconds later, a membrane stretched over the cockpit canopy. Because the canopy had been constructed from the atom up, virtually no impurities hampered its makeup, and in theory, nothing outside of weapons fire could penetrate it. Even so, the canopy creaked under the strain of the creature’s embrace. The rest of the hull complained as the creature subjected the hopper to tremendous pressure.
Cody disconnected his cornea display from the external view. “It couldn’t consume the hopper, could it? I mean, I can’t imagine any digestive chemicals could—”
“It don’t wanna eat the shell,” Deveau said. “It wants the juicy meat on the inside.”
Sonja pushed the throttle forward again. The hopper’s impellers inched the hopper forward. The hull groaned even more.
“Fuck it.” Sonja’s fingers moved across the board. A bright-red light flashed next to the throttle.
“Oh, shit,” Bodin said. “Inside the launch tube?”
“Maneuvering impellers aren’t doing the trick. Got to try the main drive.” Sonja called out over her shoulder, “Hold tight!”
Bodin shook his head. “Hope we don’t crash through the side of the tube.”
Sonja inched the throttles up. The hopper vibrated violently under the strain of the main impellers. The engines had been designed for operation out in open space at five-hundred-g acceleration, not inside the narrow confines of a launch tube.
For a full second, the creature held fast, which was impressive, considering the force of the main drive, but not even that massive creature could withstand the acceleration for long. Suddenly, the hopper plunged forward as the monster lost its grip. Metal screeched as the hopper’s speed far exceeded recommended launch tube velocities. The exit zipped past, and the vessel was in open water.
Sonja let out a shout. “Ha! Home free. Stand by for—oh, shit!” A section of the rock loomed before them. Sonja yanked the stick to port.
Crash straps pulled Cody back against the wall as the hopper lurched away from the rock. Despite the internal inertia plates that struggled to keep the high-g turn from crushing the occupants, Cody found breathing difficult. A brief second later, the hopper lurched violently as it bounced off part of the rock. The seals on the door gave way, and water sprayed into the hopper. Alarms blared, as if they needed some kind of indication that they were in a lot of trouble.
In the cockpit, Sonja’s reflection against the canopy grimaced. Every indicator on her board shined bright red. Water dribbled through the edges of the canopy where it met the main hull. A dull blue light appeared outside. It spun and grew brighter as they approached the surface. He could barely hear Sonja’s voice over the alarms and the spray of water that filled the hopper.
“Depth.”
“Forty meters,” Bodin said. “We’re getting heavy.”
“I’ve got main impellers on full,” Sonja said. “At least the one that’s still working.”
The water level inside the cabin rose, and Cody wondered if they would reach the surface before the hopper filled completely with water. Anne had disengaged herself from the crash straps and was treading water. The water was almost at Cody’s level. He depressed the release and waited for the straps to retract into the wall.
They didn’t retract.
“Oh, no.” Cody hit the release again, to no effect. “I might be in a bit of trouble.”
Anne held tightly to his chair, still treading water. Water pooled up at the back of the hopper, which meant they were pointing straight up, and the internal gravity was out altogether. No wonder the g-forces were so strong.
Anne ran her hand over the chair’s console. When the controls didn’t come to life, she frowned. “The whole thing’s shorted out.”
“Yep.” Jim ran his hands across the controls hovering near the wall. “Pumps are out, too.”
She ran her fingers through the controls on the sides of the chair. They beeped in response. “I can’t disengage them.”
Sonja craned her neck around, her hands still on the controls. “Get him out of there!”
“Working on it.” Deveau pulled himself toward Cody. Standing on the back door, he pulled out a knife. “Somebody help me out.”
Anne took out her own knife and went to work on the straps. Artificial web fibers and interlaced crystalline carbon threads of the straps made cutting them difficult. Even though the plasti-ceramic knives weren’t quite monomolecular, they were close. They would get through the tough fibers in time—probably. Cody had read all of this during their voyage, but those bits of random trivia didn’t help him at that moment.
Anne was halfway through the shoulder straps. “Hang on, Doc. We’ll get you out.”
“Twenty meters to surface,” Bodin said.
“We’re slowing down,” Sonja said. “I’m going to one hundred fifteen percent on the reactor.”
“Won’t do us much good if you burn them out,” Bodin said.
Sonja turned and shouted something at them, but Cody didn’t hear it. The water had already risen over his head. The hollow sound indicative of being under water reminded him of the crash tubes. Only this time, he couldn’t breathe the liquid.
Cody was calm, just as he had been when they were burning through the atmosphere. His reaction was because of either shock or the acceptance that the end was near. His lungs screamed as he held his breath. The shoulder straps finally gave way, but his legs were still pinned. Sonja turned and yelled. Her lips formed his name before he passed out.
Chapter Four
Cody’s eyes fluttered open. The act delighted him, because it meant he was alive. The light stung at first, but his eyes adjusted quickly.
A shadow covered his hazy vision. “You okay, Doc?” Anne smiled at him. “How’s your head?”
Cody rubbed the skin seal on his forehead, wondering when that happened. Most of the patch had already melded with the real skin. “Better, I think.” He stood. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he sat back down. “What’s going on?”
“Hopper’s main drive is down,” Anne said. “Gunny had to push everything past safety limits to get topside.”
“The reactor’s out altogether?”
Anne nodded. “It nearly overloaded. She had to jettison the hydrogen before it nuked. So, we’re alive, but we can’t go anywhere.” She nodded behind her. “Seals were broken, so there was no point in staying inside the hopper. The atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen, and the nanos in our body should filter out any foreign organisms that might invade. Smells funny, though.”
Cody inhaled deeply and gagged. Anne had a strange notion of what smelled funny. The thick scent of rot permeated the terribly hot air. It had to be forty-five or fifty degrees centigrade. The heat, the rot, and the humidity made breathing difficult. Thick yellow clouds stretched to the horizon, but it was as bright as any day on Earth. Near the horizon hung the crescent shape of a large moon, visible even through the haze of the sky.
The hopper sat nearby, over a hundred meters away from the water. The damp alien sand led right up to the hopper edge, though the ocean itself had receded. Inland, some two hundred meters Cody guessed, stood a row of what resembled trees. Of course, they could have been something else entirely. Other worlds had their own variants on life despite the similarities. Even a brief glance at the “trees” confirmed this. On top of a dark trunk rested a red sheet that curled upward in a bowl shape. It could’ve been a single large leaf or a collection of smaller ones. Cody couldn’t tell at that distance. Whatever it was, it looked like a massive satellite dish angled toward the sun.
The dish trees were the largest things in sight. Detecting distance through the thick soup that served as the planet’s atmosphere was difficult. On the dark-reddish ground between him and the dish trees stood clumps of a bright-red vegetation similar to bushes, but with shapes that were nothing like those on Earth. They seemed thinnest near the ground, spreading into a sort of reverse-bowl shape near the top—almost the opposite of the dish- trees. Many different kinds of vegetation, or at least this world’s equivalent to vegetation, covered the rest of the landscape. The colors ranged from pink to red, and sometimes to purple.
At Cody’s feet, strange worm-like reeds surrounded him. He could have sworn they hadn’t been there earlier. Each reed had varying shades of red, with the occasional purple. They waved, but Cody didn’t feel a breeze.
More reeds grew outside the camp, but they weren’t quite the same. They had split open near the top, showing five stalks that jutted out from the main reed. Strands of white gossamer
stretched not only between the different stalks of individual reeds, but also between the different reeds as well. The web-like fibers connected every reed, interlacing and wrapping themselves into an astonishingly complex lattice.
Bodin strode up to Cody, holding something in his hand. He wore an airtight mask around his face. “Put this on, clue.”
Cody barely caught the filtration mask Bodin tossed him. It seemed heavier than it should be. Bodin handed another to Anne.
“Jim’s breaking out the suits right now.” Bodin left before Cody could respond.
Cody put on the mask. It altered its shape and adjusted to his face, creating the perfect seal. He breathed deeply. Already, the rot faded from his nostrils.
Jim stood inside the hopper, prying open lockers with a makeshift crowbar. He had piled several crates and small containers just outside the rear door. Jim winked at Cody while popping open another locker. “How’s the head?”
“I’m okay.” He walked over and stood by the edge of the door. “Not sure how it happened, though.”
“Well, maybe that’s for the best.” Jim pulled a crate from the locker. “How you doing otherwise?”
Cody shook his head slowly. “All those people. God, I—”
“Don’t do that,” Jim said. “Think about survival. Worry about the dead later.”
“But—”
“No buts, Doc.” Jim held his hand to his chest. “I knew most of them longer, remember? I want to think about them, too, but I can’t. We survive now and grieve later.”
Cody nodded. He waved his hand at the crates in the hopper. “Need any help?”
“Just about done.” He pointed at the ground with his chin as he carried the crate outside. “That grass is something, ain’t it?”
“I don’t think it’s very much like grass, though,” Cody said.
“Me neither.” Jim pointed at the ground. “Especially how it comes and goes like that.”
