DATE POINT: 3Y 10M 4W 2D AV
ABOARD THE DEVASTATOR, LANDED ON AGWAR
JENNIFER DELANEY
Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties space-babe adventurer, inadvertent religious icon and war hero, and current leader of whatever-the-fuck this situation could be called. When she had lived back on Earth, she’d had a normal goddamned life and a normal goddamned job, and her boss had often enjoyed saying how things had ‘gone from bad to worse’. Susan—that was her name, Susan McEvoy—had bandied about the phrase until it had lost any meaning it had ever had, trivialising it with her mundanity. Faced with her current circumstances, Jen couldn’t see any other way to describe how things were developing, and if anything it seemed like a gross understatement. Maybe it was better to say that things had gone from dreadful to awful, although that hardly rolled off the tongue. Darragh had been much more straightforward with his assessment, declaring that everything was completely fucked.
That was about the size of it, Jen figured: everything was fucked. Now it was up to her to tell everyone just how fucked it all was.
Oh well, she thought to herself, at least they’ll have confirmation.
It wasn’t as though it was any great secret, not with the way the last several days had been going—not with the way Adrian wasn’t healing, or the disastrous attempt to let the automated medical suite have a go at fixing him—and the atmosphere at today’s meeting was a grim one.
“I take it we’re in for bad news again,” Darragh observed, gathering as much from her sour expression. “Best just get it over with.”
They were sat around the conference table in Chir’s office, or at least it was the room he’d claimed as such. It was an austere room without unnecessary decoration, and was only furnished as need dictated, but the seats were larger and softer than the human body required and so they found it comfortable if dreary. Chir was at the head of the table—this was his ship, after all—while the large display that occupied the other end currently showed detailed scans of the incredibly deadly warship that remained in orbit. Jen was sitting to Chir’s immediate left, directly across from Darragh, and to the right of Xayn, while Keffa preferred to stand. Askit was absent as usual, although Jen knew he’d be busy listening in to the conversation and would interject as he saw fit.
Jen replied to Darragh with a sombre nod. “It’s been a month and there hasn’t been a change in Adrian’s condition, and our supplies are beginning to run low. We need to talk about what we’re going to do about that.”
“Maybe we should talk about why he’s like that in the first place?” Keffa suggested sternly, turning a dark look upon Jen.
Darragh winced along with Jen. “Come on, Keff… there was no way Jen could have known—”
Keffa cut him off with a hiss. “Of course you’d take her side!”
He stared at the table; this wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument, and he seemed to have an endless well of patience for dealing with the spacer-girl’s crap. If it had been up to Jen they’d have left the jealous idiot on the nearest station, but that wasn’t a luxury they currently had available to them. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, “I’m just trying to be reasonable.”
“It’s not reasonable to give someone a bunch of alien drugs you don’t know a thing about!” Keffa shot back, and turned a critical eye back to Jen. “They talked you up a lot, but in the end you’ve fucked us all!”
Jen bit her tongue, resisting the urge to give in to the argument, and she didn’t like to admit it but the girl was right. She’d been the one making the decisions when Adrian had collapsed after the battle, and she’d been the one making the decisions that put him in the medical suite. She’d been so focused on getting him into it that hadn’t done her due diligence on what it was putting into him, and it wasn’t until later that she’d finally figured out what she’d done.
Not that Keffa knew any of that—none of them did, it was Jen’s secret to keep—so she was just making unfounded accusations, but somehow that made it hurt all the more. It was as if Keffa could see through the façade of ignorance and supposition that Jen had projected since the incident, and it never felt nice to have a buried secret exposed.
The truth was that she had been able to recognise one of the drugs they had given their resident ubermensch; cold comfort given that it was only due to her fandom of a popular television show about illicit drug-making that she even had that knowledge. The show had piqued her interest and she’d spent long hours of downtime trawling the internet for anything and everything she could learn about it. Most people would have forgotten the details over the years, but Cruezzir didn’t make forgetting easy, and Jen had recognised ‘Oxaron’ for what it really was. Granted it had only been a little bit, but as far as she was concerned any amount was too much when it was injected directly into the brain, and it was little wonder that the Human Disaster had torn apart the medical unit a moment later. It was far more surprising that he had survived that in addition to the three Nerve-Jam blasts, something she was sure would have killed anyone but Adrian, but as weeks had passed even that belief had fallen into question.
“It’s no secret that things didn’t turn out as we expected,” she said, her eyes shifting between each of them. “But we can’t just sit here waiting for a day that may never come. As you know, I’ve been talking to the A.I. every day, and I’ve been stalling for Adrian’s recovery, but as it looks as though we’ll need some help for that I’ve been building towards another solution.”
“Meaning the rest of us get away?” Darragh inferred, one eyebrow raised above a disapproving gaze. Whatever his feelings were about Adrian in particular, the young Irishman made no secret of his ‘no man left behind’ attitude.
“Meaning we go for help,” Jen corrected. “I’ve managed to talk the A.I. into letting the rest of us leave and return.”
“How?” Chir asked. “How did you convince it to do this?”
Jen gave a little shrug. “It wasn’t easy, but in the end it’s only interested in Adrian. I just had to talk it into letting the rest of us move around as we wish.”
Next to her, Xayn let out a long and thoughtful hiss. “If it were me, I would make this my ploy, and capture you all to serve as bait for my main prize.”
“Interesting idea,” mused Chir, turning it over in his mind. He look to Jen sceptically. “How do we know that’s not the case?”
Jen sighed. “I don’t think it’s clever enough for that, and I’ve been careful to build up a story, so it’s believable. Besides, it’s not as though we have a choice.”
“Shit,” Darragh grumbled, and the sentiment was echoed: every last one of them knew she was right, and a sullen silence followed.
“What’s your plan, then?” Askit asked over the comms, apparently listening in after all. “With Adrian out of commission, ‘Plan B’ is definitely out.”
“I enjoy ‘Plan B’!’ Xayn volunteered, although it was immediately apparent that he was in the minority.
“My plan,” Jen replied, ignoring the V’Straki engineer, “is to leave on an ‘errand’ at Adrian’s command. What we’re really doing is getting more medical supplies and a surgeon.”
Keffa crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall, wearing no sign of belief whatsoever. “I doubt we’re going to find a surgeon who’ll want to help us!”
“Hah!” Chir barked, almost literally. “I can’t remember the last time we went looking for volunteers.”
Darragh sighed. “Business as usual, then.”
“Business as usual,” Jen confirmed with a nod. “We’ll have to take the Devastator for this, though, since it’s better armed.”
“Problem there,” Darragh pointed out. “The ‘Spot’, which is a stupid name for a starship, doesn’t have a medical suite, and Adrian kind of needs one to live.”
“Stasis,” Chir inferred before Jen could answer. “We’re going to put him back in the stasis pod, aren’t we? This whole venture will have been a waste of time!”
“Is that a no?” Jen asked.
“It’s a reluctant yes,” Chir growled testily. “Let’s not mess this up again!”
“I agree with the Gaoian,” Askit announced.
“Me too,” Darragh agreed, and Xayn and Trycrur were quick to follow. All eyes turned to Keffa, who likewise granted a grating concession.
“Good,” Jen said, releasing a breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. “I’ll talk to Groddi and make the preparations. We can trust them to hold down the fortress—so to speak—while we’re away.”
With everyone in agreement the meeting was adjourned, and Jen was left to follow through with her plan. The first step was moving Adrian back into a stasis pod, which the Agwarens were more than capable of doing, but the second was somewhat more involved. After a month in the encampment the natives had managed to build a substantial semi-permanent structure around the two starships, and Lord Groddi had claimed one of the little rooms as his own. Having few tools of their own to begin with, Jen and Xayn had assisted in getting things started, but they were an industrious people who had done much with what they’d been given. Groddi seemed to think it had a lot to do with the loss of their home, and that the soldiers were working in preference to grieving, and Jen couldn’t help but agree. This much was good enough to keep them alive so far, and although it might be unsustainable in the long term it was exactly what was needed right now, so she saved any objections or advice for a later date.
“How long will you be?” Groddi asked her as they took a walk around the compound. The little room was his office in name, but in practice he preferred to walk around while he conversed, and was satisfied with it being a status symbol. “There will not be enough food for an extended wait—even now we’re exhausting the local resources. If we run out…”
“We won’t be that long,” Jen assured him; the nearest colony was only a couple weeks away at most, and supplies were not dwindling as fast as Groddi was suggesting. “I need you to stay here and look after Adrian in the meantime.”
“We have no medicine,” Groddi replied.
She shook her head with a smile. “There’ll be no need for you to do anything but stand guard over the smaller vessel.”
It was clear from his expression that he doubted this, but he didn’t voice his dispute—by now he’d seen enough to simply accept any madness she chose to tell him, no matter how unlikely, and this was no different. Not long ago Groddi had demanded explanations for all sorts of things, and Jen had obliged, but he’d stopped once he’d established that he didn’t understand any of it anyway.
“I must ask,” he said, “what if you do not return?”
Jen bit her lower lip thoughtfully. “To the north there’s a narrow strait between here and the mainland that should be easily crossed. If we’re not back in sixty days, you can head that way.”
“Sixty days…” he repeated. “Will that be enough?”
Jen wasn’t sure, although it was more than twice as long as was needed to reach the nearest colony in the Devastator, but it wasn’t as though she could keep the Agwarens around here forever. Sixty days was as long as she could ask of them, and was probably longer than they could really afford. “It’ll have to be.”
He nodded sagely, and slowed to a stop so that he could turn to face her. “I understand. You have my word that we will remain here for sixty days; it’s the least we can do. When do you leave?”
“We’ve agreed to do so tomorrow,” she told him. “I’ve made arrangements with the machine-mind in the stars to let us pass.”
“Then I should wish you luck,” said Groddi, holding out a hand as he’d learned from her. “We shall shake on it.”
Jen took the Agwaren’s hand and shook it firmly. “Thank you, Groddi.”
“Thank you, Chosen One,” he replied, “in spite of everything.”
With that they parted to attend to preparations, and Jen could hear the Agwaren noble issuing commands to the soldiers for the remainder of the day. With their help Adrian was returned to the stasis pod and then to his starship, while most of Spot’s supplies were transferred in the other direction. Night fell and campfires were lit, but there was no sense of celebration as might have been expected, and nobody seemed to have a problem with this. After everything that had happened it appeared they were all well past cheering for another dangerous venture, and were content with quiet fireside contemplation instead.
There was little conversation that evening, and the crew of the Devastator went back aboard the starship to get a sound rest before the day of reckoning. As with all other days, however, it arrived with a green-blue glow on the horizon and no fanfare; Jen was second to the command deck after Chir, who had not slept.
“Too excited to sleep?” she asked him sardonically, although if she were honest she’d hardly done better; it had seemed as though she’d been waking up every fifteen minutes, and it had left her feeling ten shades of crap.
He looked back at her bitterly. “Nerves.”
Jen sat down in the seat beside his and leaned over. “You know, I seem to recall us being in worse circumstances, and we survived them just fine.”
“I don’t seem to recall being at the mercy of an incomprehensibly powerful warship before,” he replied, and tapped a few buttons on his personal console to project the image on the main display. “We have no way of escaping that thing if it decides to get rid of us, let alone putting up a fight.”
“I know that,” she admitted, “but we have no choice.”
“Which makes it no less terrifying,” he pointed out, and a bleak silence fell between them until he broke it. “Will you tell me about Layla?”
Jen blinked, forgetting for a moment that they even had the female Gaoian aboard, but guilt set in soon after. “I’ve told you what I can…”
He snarled in disgust. “This might be our last few moments! I only ask you to be honest with me… no… I demand it. If I may die today, Jen, then I will die without this awful mystery!”
At first Jen said nothing. She wasn’t sure what she should say after a month of leaving him in the dark, but his point was fairly made and the thought of lying to him again was like poison in her belly. “I don’t know all the details,” she said after a long moment, and raised a hand to forestall his objection, “but I do know that’s not your Layla, Chir. Your Layla is safe where you left her, what we have here is some bizarre copy from an alternative history where the two of you were bitter enemies.”
He stared at her as if she were mad. “I’m aware of the theory,” he said, “but that seems…”
“I know,” Jen conceded, her own feelings on the matter being much the same, “but it’s just another completely impossible thing we can attribute to the ‘Human Disaster’. Honestly, since I learned this I’ve started wondering if he really is a god after all!”
“If he is, he’s not a very good one,” Chir replied bitterly.
“Bloody terrible,” she agreed with a sour grin.
They turned together as Darragh and Keffa stepped onto the command deck in quick succession, careful to avoid looking at each other as they took their respective positions. Chir glanced at Jen questioningly, and she replied with a light shrug; it was obvious enough what had happened since the prior evening, and it wasn’t anyone’s business but their own. If anything Jen wished her own opportunity had arisen, since there was a strong likelihood that she wasn’t going to get another, but that ship had well and truly sailed.
“Are we ready to depart?” Chir asked once Darragh had got himself settled.
“Everything is ready,” Darragh replied. “We can go anytime.”
“Where are the others?” Keffa asked, looking around at everything except for Darragh. “Shouldn’t they be here?”
“Askit and Xayn are still down in cargo,” Jen told her, trying her best to suppress a knowing smile. “Layla is in her new quarters, as usual.”
A troubled darkness crossed Chir’s face at that mention, and he faced the main display with forced resolve. “Let’s get going, then.”
Moments later the Devastator was at full power, and was rising quickly through the atmosphere. The display cut over to the external view, revealing an island in a dark sea and a sprawling continent of thick green jungle, and as they rose the landmass spread and changed and grew less distinct until it was only an expanse of graduating colours and the blue sky had turned to darkness. It wasn’t long before the planet was being left behind, and the Devastator was ready to shift into warp.
The communication link initiated, indicating that they were being hailed, but that was not unexpected. Knowing what had happened last time, and how the ship had been compromised, this was something for which they were prepared, but a look passed between them even though they all knew it was coming, and it was with some trepidation that Jen accepted the contact.
“Hello,” it said.
The voice had always struck Jen as being surprisingly natural, with few exceptions, but those had become less frequent over time. Even so there was something that told her it was not quite right about the voice, and it unnerved her on an instinctive level. “We’re leaving as discussed,” she told it. “Adrian Saunders is still in seclusion, as I told you yesterday.”
“Yes,” it said.
She had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but hoped that it meant that everything was alright. There was certainly no indication that there was anything stopping them from leaving, and even the Gravity Spike had been released. “We’ll be back as soon as we can,” she earnestly assured it. With no idea of its capabilities, Jen kept as close to the truth as she could whenever she spoke with it.
A powerful scan passed over them, strong enough to make their flesh tingle with strange energies, and she had to hold back a sneeze while scratching at the lingering tingle that danced around her nose. “Satisfied?” she asked in irritation.
“Yes,” it repeated, and the communications link closed.
“That was weird,” Darragh muttered, and there was a general murmur of agreement. In Jen’s experience it had usually been more conversant, and always pressed her for more information, so it was strange for it to be so succinct.
“Let’s get going, Darragh,” Chir ordered, leaning back into his seat. “I’ll be glad to get away from this place for a while.”
With no hesitation whatsoever, Darragh nearly managed to execute the command before the Gaoian had finished giving it, and a heartbeat later Jen felt the nearly imperceptible shift into warp space take hold. Only in the back of her mind did Jen begin to realise it had happened fractionally sooner than ought to have been possible, and by then everything had changed…
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DATE POINT UNKNOWN
LOCATION UNKNOWN
ADRIAN SAUNDERS
Death was darkness. That was the common understanding throughout a galaxy devoid of religion and empty of spiritualism—there was no light at the end of a tunnel, no guiding warmth, and the comforting faces of friends and family were altogether absent—but it wasn’t a lack of faith that had bestowed that belief, but rather a simple matter of neurology: when a sentient being died there simply wasn’t anything left for the brain to do, and so it quickly shut down. Only the human brain, in all its complexity, could produce the slow wind-down needed to produce such an effect: a final lie to comfort the dying. Had anybody outside the blue-green deathworld bothered to study this, they would have thought it strange that such an unforgiving place could produce such a kindness.
This matter of neurology was the cause behind so many near-death stories on the human homeworld, and no doubt served to reinforce the many religions that occupied it, but to Adrian Saunders it was nothing new, and he passed through the experience with a sense of familiarity. How many times had he died now? It must have been four at the very least, provided he didn’t count life before space, and he no longer found it as confusing as he’d once done, but it wasn’t as though all that practice counted for anything, and there really wasn’t any skill involved either. When you thought about it that way, it only boiled down to him being terrible at actually dying. Some people might call it a blessing, but it began to wear a little thin by the third occurrence, although this time had featured kaleidoscopic visions which were new and extremely disorienting. Those had all faded away long before he awoke, and he had no idea how long he had remained unconscious, but when he finally woke it was to utter silence and a tiny red indicator light flashing pitifully against total darkness.
He couldn’t see a damned thing except that light, and every part of him ached terribly—not least his head, which felt as though hot spikes were piercing it over and over—but he could at least sense he was laying down. When he attempted to move, however, he discovered that he was confined, and struggled to re-arrange himself in the tiny space. He tried to call out, but the words caught in a parched throat and came out as a croaking groan. If this was the result of his new ‘super-speed’ he was never going to try using it again, even if he could figure out how.
He squinted, slowly managing to focus on that tiny blinking light and check his surroundings in the instant of illumination, and eventually managed to make out it out as the power alert on a status display. That was enough information to tell him where he was: the inside of a stasis pod.
“Shit,” he tried to say, but it came out as a barking cough that brought tears to his eyes, and he resolved not to try talking again until he’d had something to drink—whoever was looking after him was doing a really shitty job of it.
Now that he knew where he was, he was able to open the coffin-like enclosure without issue, flinging open the door with one grunt of effort, and pulling himself upright with another, finding himself in a far more expansive darkness than the little stasis-pod. That was bad: normally the pod would have illuminated when opened, but the power cells were drained well beyond failing to produce a stasis field. That meant he’d somehow slept through the last of the power, which also meant that nobody had been to check on the pod in the better part of a week.
Adrian felt a heavy knot of fear twist in his belly—he couldn’t imagine his friends voluntarily leaving him to expire in a glorified space coffin—and he began to move with a greater sense of urgency, pulling himself free of the pod and landing painfully on a cold metal floor.
That was another bad sign—the hull of a starship was naturally the same as that of the environment, which was regulated by life support. Wherever he was, everything was turned off, and if this was a starship that was far from good.
Dark and cold, and mostly naked, Adrian carefully to his feet and groped around blindly to get an idea of where he was. His limited infrared abilities, for what little they could manage, did nothing to help him against uniformly cool surroundings, and he moved forward slowly with arms outstretched until he ran into a crate and stubbed his toe.
“Fuck!” he croaked, forgetting himself and kicking off another coughing fit that demanded he lean on the crate he’d just assaulted. As luck had it, however, his fingers lighted on the familiar form of a data-pad.
Closing his eyes and turning his head, Adrian activated the data-pad and let himself adjust to the brilliant light that spilled from a dusty screen, revealing he was in the nearly empty cargo-hold of his own starship. He glared at the crate, wondering how, in a mostly empty room, he’d managed to walk straight into one of the few obstacles—yet another thing he could attribute to his luck.
There was no sign of his clothes, however, and all he’d been left with were the custom-made socks and underpants he’d fashioned when he’d first gained access to a working fabricator. His skin was pallid in the cold white light, but inky black bruises ran along the veins on his limbs, creeping out in a cobweb of dark lines, giving at least some explanation to the sluggishness he felt in every movement. Whatever injuries he’d suffered, it seemed he was far from fully recovered. He guessed that maybe they’d been unable to heal him, and that was why they had put him into the stasis-pod, but it wasn’t as though they were around to ask…
It was then that Adrian finally noticed the content of the data-pad’s display: the system directory was open with a video already highlighted. The video was concisely named ‘for Adrian—just in case’, which he didn’t much like the sound of, but he wasn’t about to ignore what was obviously intended for him.
Opening it revealed the familiar face of his Corti companion, but Askit wore a grim expression instead of his usual devil-may-care demeanour. He looked at the camera, turned his head to make some adjustments on his data-pad, and returned his focus his viewer. “This,” he said, “is a message for Adrian. If you’re wondering who that is, it’s the human in that pod you found, and you can switch this off now.”
He waited a moment, as though waiting for the viewer to decide whether to keep watching, and he took the time to look about as though considering his next words. “Well,” he finally continued, “if you really are Adrian, then we probably haven’t returned and the stasis-pod has run out of power, so there’s a good chance we’re all dead. Congratulations on your recovery, I really wish I could have been there.”
Adrian felt the knot of fear tighten further, until it felt like a lump of lead was weighing in his gut. How long could a stasis-pod maintain the stasis field for? Without knowing the original power it was impossible to know.
“Check the date on this data-pad,” Askit told him, as if reading his thoughts from across time and space. “At least you’ll have an idea of how long you’ve been away. The data-pad will be in power conservation mode, but the power cell can keep it going for several cycles while maintaining good accuracy. The stasis-pod had considerably less in reserve… it doesn’t look like we ever bothered to charge the thing.”
Adrian swiped out of the video and his eyes widened at the date—he’d been in that pod for over four months! Feeling weak, he leaned heavily on the crate for support. To have come so close to his goal, so close to Jen, and then to lose her again was more than he could bear. He stood there, not moving, not thinking, not doing anything but breathing in and out for who knew how long? The screen of the data-pad timed out, returning him to darkness until curiosity got the better of him and Adrian continued the video from where he’d left off.
“As I record this, you aren’t getting better,” Askit explained. “Everybody else thinks you’re going to die if we don’t get you help. Everybody except for me—that’s why I’m leaving this message behind, although it’s not as though you’ll ever know if I was wrong—but even I don’t think you’re going to recover without help. The warship that Chir is calling the ‘fake Zhadersil’ won’t let you leave, but Jen has somehow talked it into allowing the rest of us to depart aboard a single starship. The plan is to go for more medical supplies and a doctor, but if you’re watching this I suppose things didn’t go as planned. Be careful, Adrian: that thing actually believes you’re a deity, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to disabuse it of the notion.”
Askit glanced behind him, as though he were being called away—and maybe he was. “Take care, Adrian; I know you’re not very subtle, but there’s no way of knowing how things stand after so long. Good luck, my friend, it’s been… exciting.”
With that the video ended, returning the data-pad to the system tree, and leaving Adrian at a loss as to what he should do next. He looked around at the cargo hold as though it might contain the answer in addition to the handful of crates, but their only answer was a thick and heavy silence. With nothing else to do, and favouring activity over idleness, he found himself moving from the cargo hold and into the main corridor, exploring the familiar space in the weird pale light.
Adrian’s first stop was at his own quarters, where he found spare clothing tucked away in one of the storage units, and drank his fill of water from the room’s dispenser—given how thirsty he’d been, he thought he’d just about drank the whole ship dry. The bed was unmade, and there were signs that somebody had been using it since he’d been there, but the mattress had cooled long ago and a fine layer of dust rested on every surface. He dressed himself gingerly, gasping at the occasional lance of pain that split through him as he slipped into the ill-fitting grey shirt and trousers. His shotgun lay underneath the bed as usual, next to a fully-charged fusion blade and a Zheron pistol—still clinging to its magnetic holster—that he pulled out and strapped to his thigh.
Clothing himself seemed to renew his purpose, and Adrian found himself considering his next move as he stepped out of the darkened bedroom and back into the main corridor. The power was completely out, and that meant the reactor had been intentionally shut down. Given that the reactor would run without issue until slowly degrading materials forced it into desuetude, power conservation could not have been the reason behind the decision. It must have been an effort to hide his whereabouts, hoping that an unpowered hull would shield the stasis-pod against sensors, and on a planet full of ruined Hunter ships, it was unlikely anybody would search this one for signs of habitation.
That was clever, Adrian thought, and wondered if it had been Jen to come up with the idea. It might have been—she’d changed so much from the frightened Irish girl he’d rescued that he barely recognised her as the same person—but it was more likely to have been Xayn, who was an actual engineer, or Chir, who possessed a very human level of cunning.
Whoever was responsible, Adrian reckoned it would be unwise to turn everything back on without first inspecting what was outside his ship. The planet had not been particularly pleasant, and would be decidedly less so after the damage from the battle, but it should still be very habitable unless they’d parked the ship at one of the poles. But if that had been the case, he reflected, the ship would have been a lot colder than it currently was.
There was nothing for it but to venture outside anyway, since he wasn’t about to stand around in the dark with only the data-pad for illumination. Jen had managed to survive on this planet with no particular survival training, while Adrian had been trained by the military for all sorts of bullshit environments. Using the manual controls he opened the exterior hatch, and let the door swing inward under the press of a small flood of slimy mud. The air was heavy and shocked Adrian at first, thicker with the scent of soil and forest than he’d experienced during the battle, and an overgrown forest towered into the cloudless night sky. He took a few steps out into the strange new world, his eyes quickly adjusting to the new conditions, and looked around. The starship was surrounded by a decaying wooden palisade, with signs of fresh growth everywhere he looked, and Spot, his starship, was partially gripped by vine-like roots that stretched across the hull. It was some kind of jungle, he realised, and a salty scent informed him about the proximity to the ocean. Like on Affrag, they’d set up base in a tropical climate where they wouldn’t have to worry about the cold, but unlike the colony world there seemed something too imposing about what grew here. In the distance something snarled unnaturally, and something else shrieked in fear and pain for half a moment, only to be cut short before it could complete its cry. Primal instincts told Adrian that he’d heard enough and that further exploration could wait until morning, and the sounds of heavy movements in the nearby darkness only reinforced that opinion. Wiping away the excess mud as the movements grew nearer, he forced the exterior door closed as the flicker of movement passed behind the palisade.
Morning, he reflected, could not come soon enough.
Dawn broke without Adrian having slept, not that he was particularly inclined to do so. He may have felt like total crap, but he’d slept for long enough and he didn’t have good feelings about whatever he’d seen in the jungle. Unlikely though intelligence was, he wanted to be ready if anything tried to steal aboard his vessel. Ready to do what, exactly, was another question entirely, and although several hours had passed he still hadn’t figured out the answer.
Sunlight returned Adrian to activity, even if he did not yet venture outside. Now that it daytime he felt able to leave his post by the exterior door and inspect the rest of his ship. Mostly there was nothing of note—things were pretty much how he’d left them—but he’d been expecting to find a different situation in the computer core. It was therefore surprising to find it also as it had been, complete with the memory core that held all that remained of Trycrur.
With that discovery came an almost overpowering urge to power everything up, but he knew it would need to wait until he had a better idea about what was going on, and start to properly recover. It was still a comfort to know that he wasn’t completely alone, even if he couldn’t switch anything on.
The passage of hours had at least improved his health. He no longer suffered from the headache, tiredness and confusion that accompanied dehydration, although his skin felt leathery wherever he touched it. Food was another matter, however, and there was an ache in his belly that seemed to have settled into residence. There had still been a handful of nutrient spheres aboard, which he had devoured without hesitation, but they might has well have evaporated into the air for all the good they did him. He had no choice but to venture out into the forest where who-knew-what was lurking, but the day was still young and his guns were loaded.
Stepping from the ship during the day was a less haunting experience, and revealed much that he had missed in the previous brief excursion. Vine-like roots sprang from the ground all over the area immediately surrounding the ship, some of them rising up as new trees while others snaked across the soft earth and wrapped around anything they could grip. A heavy earthiness permeated the air, tinged by the hint of saltwater he had detected the night before, but now the forest chirped with birdsong—or at least the song of whatever passed for birds around here. An inspection of the wooden palisade showed it was not as decayed as he had thought, but was being steadily destroyed by fat white bugs that had burrowed into them and buzzed in warning whenever he disturbed them.
His skin prickled when he found the tracks, his primal instincts warning him about what they represented. They were big and heavy, and whatever had made them had moved with urgency towards the ship, stopping several paces from the door but still well inside the fortified area. The ground was firmer in places, and he found footprints as big as his own, all terminating with the long grooves of claws. For the moment, though, there was no sign of the beast that had trampled the vegetation, and Adrian set about the first of his scouting activities. The old trees grew tall and rigid, with fresh branches bursting from their upper limits, and there was no question about whether they would bear his weight. A particularly tall example was scarcely fifty strides into the tree-line, with hard old bark that provided plenty of finger-holds. His body complained, but the twinges of pain and cracks of underused muscles didn’t stop him from making quick progress into the canopy, where he was greeted by a sweeping view of the forest from above.
He frowned, looking around as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. To his right lay the distant ocean, but everywhere else was a relatively modestly forested woodland. Only here in his immediate vicinity, and at seemingly random other locations, did it differ. In these places it was lush and overgrown, with every indication of fresh and recent growth, and it graduated in a way that proved the effect was spreading.
“Oh crap,” he said, realising exactly what this meant: somehow the gut bacteria that produced Cruezzir had gotten loose in the ecosystem, and this was the result. On any standard world it might have killed everything with an overdose—and now that he considered it, there was a strong chance it was already happening on Cimbrean—but here it had simply upended the natural forces of evolution and thrust the biosphere into overdrive. If the trees were growing like this, then the regenerative was in the soil, and he could only assume that meant it had permeated everything in the area and that it was far, far too late to stop it from spreading into what currently appeared to be the unchanged wilderness. “Oh crap!”
He returned to the ground, warier than he had been before. When he’d started out on this hunt he’d been expecting an old-growth forest, not the beginnings of a nightmare scenario, and now he worried that his weapons might not be up to snuff—the creature from last night was almost certainly under the influence of the alien wonder-drug.
A horrific screech startled him, and he whirled in its direction. It was followed by more screeches until they merged into an awful cacophony, and through it came a long, deep wail of agony as something died. Adrian ignored his instincts and dozens of horror movie plots, and stalked towards the noise, eventually emerging into a small clearing where a great, pig-like beast lay with chest still heaving as oversized leather-winged birds tore shreds of flesh away and guzzled them down. There were over a dozen of the hideous creatures, but none of them were armed and—as it turned out—were not immune to being shot through the head with a Zheron bolt, and they were far too stupid to realise what was killing them before Adrian was done with the job, and had finished off the pig beast with one last shot before letting the pistol cool.
The forest had returned to its usual quiet activity, but Adrian doubted it would stay that way, and set about taking what he needed in a hurry. Even in its current state, the pig beast was still far more appetising than the bird-creatures strewn around it, and Adrian decided to carve off an untouched piece with his fusion blade and cook it as he sliced it into edible portions. The dark-red meat smelled good, and tasted better, but he was too hungry, and too alert to danger, to actually enjoy the small mountain of meat he wolfed down, and at no time did he release his grip on the deadly V’Straki pistol. By the time he was finished eating, the bugs were already beginning to swarm into the area, lured by the intoxicating scent of barbequed flesh, and Adrian decided to declare the hunt a resounding success. It would have been better to take some back with him, perhaps, but he had no means of carrying a creature of that size.