Expendable Heroes, page 5
He didn’t think that any of them had been to a newly discovered world before. That included him. He’d travelled in space, but had never been part of the privileged few who went to the surface of the worlds they orbited. If space was a dangerous place, the surface of any world was much more dangerous, because there was a real chance that you got stuck on an uninhabited world without the support you needed, and even if the world supported life, chances were it also supported life that ate you.
About Eden, Jeremy might have said they’d found no sign of larger creatures, but he had also stressed they could not guarantee their absence.
At the controls to the craft, Jack was speaking into the headset. “Do you copy, Marmoset? Please respond if you’re hearing this.”
“Poor reception?” Luciane asked.
“The sound is garbled, like there is interference.”
“From the base, wherever it is in this jungle?”
“No idea. Could be. Could also be something else.”
“Could you take the receiver outside?”
“It’s built into the craft. But there is another communication hub in the building. We’ll use that later and then we can turn this one off to see if that helps.” He hung up the headset.
Steven glanced at the riot of vegetation out the tiny window in the back airlock. No large predators supposedly. Was he meant to believe that? Because if so, how come the team of researchers had stopped responding to the crew in orbit?
And where was this building they had constructed, anyway?
Luciane insisted on double-checking everyone, and making sure that everybody had taken a spare battery pack, as the suit would become really cumbersome when the battery ran flat.
And then, finally, they were ready to go.
When Jack opened the door to the craft, a waft of cool humid air came in. In fact, Steven was surprised to find how cool it was. For some reason, he expected the jungle to be hot and humid and had prepared himself for that, but the air was clammy and cold. It had an odd smell, reminiscent of the smell when you pulled an orange off a tree.
Jack was the first one to jump out, clearing the view so Steven could see out past Luciane. The ground, some hills ahead and the bottoms of trees were all covered in a thick layer of lush plants.
There was nothing that remained of the clearing, shown to the group in pictures, where the scientists grew their food, according to Jeremy.
Yet Steven had seen the pictures of the garden with crops in neat beds. He’d seen the pictures of the forest from between the trees.
They looked nothing like this. The thick, waist-high cover of plants obscured all potential landmarks. Yet something out there responded to Jack’s device, giving him readings that scrolled across the screen.
They were definitely in the right place.
Jack jumped a few times on the spot, testing the springs in the suit. The vegetation crushed under him, making a squelching sound.
“It’s quite fragile stuff,” he said, while jumping further away and kicking at the vegetation as he went. “We can clear a path like this—oops!” He slipped and almost lost his balance. “Wow, this stuff is real slippery.”
“Don’t go clowning too much,” Luciane said. “We need to find the buildings before sunset or we’ll have to sleep in the craft.”
She was next to go out, and when she jumped onto the surface from the ramp that extended from the craft door, she also slipped and almost fell.
“Oh, fuck!”
“I told you it was slippery.”
“Yeah, if you insist on stomping those plants into sludge.”
Jack scowled at her back while Luciane held a hand out to Rollo as he let himself out of the craft. Steven was last. He turned himself around and lowered the legs of the suit to the ground. The substrate felt kind of… soft, like walking on the skin of a giant animal.
And the areas where the others had trampled the plants were slippery as hell.
He handed the boxes of supplies to the others and shouldered his bag, all while walking very carefully.
He asked, “Do we shut the door or leave it open?”
They glanced at each other.
These were the kinds of things that they hadn’t thought about. If they were creatures in this jungle, and there was every indication that they existed, they did not want them to get into the craft, but they also wanted to have the door open in case they needed to get to safety quickly.
“Close it,” Luciane said. “Don’t lock it. Only Jack can open it if we do.”
“Why didn’t we all get the same codes?” Rollo said.
“Because none of you are pilots,” Jack said, his voice prim.
He took off through the waist-high jungle.
Steven pushed the door shut, but not hard enough to engage the lock. Then he followed Luciane, who was following Jack.
“Well, none of us are arseholes, either,” Rollo said in a low voice just behind Steven’s back.
Steven decided to ignore the remark.
They walked in single file away from the craft.
Steven worked out within a few steps, that it was best not to follow in somebody’s footsteps, because the fleshy stems of the plants quickly disintegrated into a very slippery and sticky slime.
But making your own path was slower, and with the high humidity, Steven soon started sweating.
Jack stopped after a while to check their location.
“The beacon says that the base is just over there.” Jack squinted at the screen. “It’s not far.”
Luciane snorted. “Well, I’m glad Xander is so sure, because I can’t see a fucking thing with all this weed.” She wiped her face with her arm in an angry gesture. Rollo’s face was red, too.
Jack kept going. Steven followed, and then Luciane and Rollo.
They hadn’t gone far when Rollo shouted, “Oh, shit!” This was followed by a crash and a thud.
Steven turned around, but couldn’t see him.
Luciane bent over and helped him up.
“This stuff stinks,” Rollo said, while scrambling back to his feet. He wiped slime off his elbow.
“Got everything?” Luciane asked.
“Think so.”
“Remind yourself to wash those gloves when we get to the building,” Steven said. “The vegetation’s compounds are alkaline, and will irritate your skin.”
“I hope to fuck there is water,” Luciane said.
Jack was still going, but it was hard to see where the base was supposed to be.
Ahead, enormous trees towered over the edge of the open space. It would be quite gloomy here early in the morning or late in the afternoon.
He understood that the scientists had cut down those trees to build the base and the plots around it. There had only been a small natural clearing.
“We’ve got it,” Jack said. “Over there.” He pointed a gloved hand.
Ahead, there was a lump of bushes where little bits of metal panelling were visible in between the vegetation. They’d found the base. That was something, at least.
Jack reached the building first and used the grip extensions on his arms to pull down the vegetation from the front of the building. He gathered the fleshy stems into a heap. Steven picked one up. The plant was a kind of creeper, with soft leaves sprouting from nodes that might grow roots when they touched the soil. New stems branched out from these nodes. Sometimes only one, but mostly two or three, turning one stem into several. This made the vegetation carpet very thick. When he rolled the stem between his gloved fingers, it broke and released a slimy sap that was both slippery and sticky. Once he got it onto the glove’s fingers, it was hard to get it off. Wiping his hand on the harness did nothing, and when the slime dried, it made his fingers stick together.
Jack’s work had revealed a round-domed shed made from prefab panels.
The door was shut, the windows a bit grimy, but the building was otherwise intact.
Luciane peered inside the window. “Too dark. Can’t see anything in there. Is there power?”
“I assume not. We’ll have to find the solar panels,” Rollo said.
“They’re out there somewhere,” Jack said, waving his hand at the jungle.
Great.
Steven pulled open the door.
As soon as daylight came in, a flurry of flying creatures, some kind of insect, came out.
“Whoa!”
He stepped back, but nothing else came out of the open door except a stale smell.
Urgh.
He went inside, bending his head as he went through the door, because the suit made him taller than a person.
Once inside, he came out into an entrance dressing room with a concrete floor where a bench stood against the wall with a row of hooks above it, where a number of boots stood on shelves on the opposite wall, a couple of waterproof jackets—they could use those—and a single mech suit in the corner.
That disturbed him. Hadn’t Jeremy said that in order to do anything outside, one needed to wear the suit? Obviously, eleven of them had gone out. What happened to the twelfth person?
He called out, “Hello?”
But if anyone was still alive and in this building, they would have responded through Xander, right?
He peeked into the open door on the other side of the dressing room.
As he had expected from the layout, it was the base’s common room with a table and chairs in the middle.
This door was too low for him to get through while wearing the suit. He tried the light switch, which predictably didn’t work, since the solar panels were outside and would be covered in vegetation.
He switched on his own light, keenly aware that he’d need to conserve power until they could get the solar array working.
Yes, it was a common room, with a kitchen block and recreation area and doors to bedrooms on the other side. It was all fairly tidy as far as he could see, although a wall sported mould stains.
There were no dead bodies on the floor.
“Seems OK in here,” he said to the others at the door. His voice sounded stuffy in the stale air. “Needs a bit of cleaning up, but everything seems to be intact.”
“Right. Let’s carry our stuff from the craft,” Jack said.
He pushed open the door and propped it open with a piece of metal he picked up out of the dirt.
“Let’s move everything quickly,” Steven said. “With those tall trees around, it will get dark here very quickly. It’s afternoon now. Let’s move as much as we can into the building. I think I’ll use this thing here.”
He picked up a shovel that leaned against the wall, went outside, and scraped the slimy plant residue off the path to the craft so that they could walk without slipping.
For the next while, they walked back and forth between the craft and the building, where the pile of survival kit and equipment in the entry hall grew. The springy legs on the suit really did wonders for being able to walk fast.
Then, when it got too dark, they closed the craft’s door, went inside the building and took off their suits. Everyone was sweaty and smelly, but there was no power, so no hot water or showers, and the best they could do was let a bit of stale water out of the tank into a bowl and splash it over themselves with their hands. They had to do this in the suiting room, because it was far too dark in the bathroom and they wanted to conserve power in case restoring the solar panels to operational status was not as easy as they hoped.
Even though he’d been careful, Steven had still ended up with plant sap on his arms. It had dried in a tough film that stuck to the hairs on his arms. He pulled out quite a few hairs while trying to remove the last traces of the crap.
“That stuff is hella itchy,” Rollo said, as he was doing the same.
It was too dark to find proper towels, so Steven dried himself with his shirt.
They ate rations by the light of a single lamp. It was humid, the air was clammy and cold, and they went to sleep early.
CHAPTER 8
A lone human building on a planet where you’re the only human inhabitants, where the previous inhabitants have vanished into thin air for some mysterious reason, was not a relaxing place, as Steven could attest to when he tried to sleep at night.
He listened intently for every sound, and when there was a sound, he had to decide if it was just another one of Rollo’s strange snores drifting in from the next room or something he needed to worry about.
The orbiting ship had not been on the same time schedule as the planet and he didn’t feel tired. His body’s rhythm was still messed up from being in stasis, anyway.
The humid air made him sweaty and clammy at the same time. He couldn’t go back to splash water on himself because it was too dark to find his way to the suiting room. And anyway, they were conserving filtered water. He could hear Rollo scratching himself in his sleep and after complaining about itchy sap, he didn’t want to suffer the same fate.
In fact, it was so dark that he saw purple spots before his eyes. It could be pretty dark on ships when the lights went off, but there was usually a little pinprick of light somewhere to show that a piece of machinery was still keeping everyone alive.
Not so in this place. There was no power, no light, and no familiar sounds. They had to conserve power from the devices they’d brought.
There was nothing he could do except wait for morning, which, on a planet with twenty-two hour days, was five hours away, according to Xander’s information, when Steven grew too impatient and turned on his reader for a few seconds.
Five hours of staring at the ceiling, listening to every little sound, wondering if it was the building creaking, someone snoring—and Rollo in the next room was putting up a show—or a creature creeping into the building ready to devour them all.
Someone started rummaging around in the common room early. When Steven went to check, he found Luciane going through the box of rations by the glow of the single light they’d found in the storeroom that still worked.
She turned around when he came in.
“Oh. It’s you. Sleep well?”
“Don’t ask.” Steven went to the table and picked up one of the food packets. It was too dark to read the label, although daylight was not far away, judging by the faint glow that peeked between the vegetation that covered the skylight window.
Luciane snorted.
“Could you imagine being married to Rollo and having to sleep with that fucking chainsaw in your bed?”
Steven wanted to say, He can’t help it, but she would know that, and it was useless to bicker over stuff like this. There would be plenty of things to bicker about later.
“Anyway, I’ve started making a list of shit we need to do today,” Luciane continued into the uneasy silence.
She pushed her pad across the table.
She had written with her stylus on a screen called an X-note. Which meant that Xander was watching. Or he would be once they turned the power back on and could communicate with the ship.
Steven scrolled through the list.
Most of the items made perfect sense to him.
Locate and uncover the solar panels and get them to work again.
Check the electricals.
Check the food situation.
Communicate these things with the ship in orbit so that they could asses what the situation on the ground was, and whether they needed to send extra supplies.
Slashing the vegetation away from the building and uncovering the windows so that they could see again.
And then, when the electricity was on, and the batteries were charging, and the windows were cleared, and they had taken stock of what they needed for survival, they could look into the labs to see if there was any indication why twelve people had disappeared into thin air.
“At least we haven’t found any dead bodies,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean they’re not there,” said Jack, who had joined them in the darkness, and pulled back a chair.
Luciane snorted. “Good morning, cheerful comrade.”
“You’re welcome.” Jack grabbed a food packet and ripped it open. There was a straw to the side of the packet, which he stuck inside and sucked. “Urgh, what junk is this?”
“Soy yoghurt and strawberries.”
Jack sniffed the open packet. “This crap has never seen a strawberry.”
“Well, we can’t be too picky,” Luciane said.
“The soy yoghurt and strawberry one is not too bad,” Rollo said, as he came from his room.
“Good morning, Mr. Chainsaw,” Luciane said.
Steven warned, “Luce…”
“What?”
Rollo had an anger management problem, after all. But he ignored Luciane’s comment, grabbed a packet and slurped his yoghurt as if he actually enjoyed it.
Jack gave him a disgusted look.
“What are you looking at me for, mate?” Rollo said. “Do you know what they fed us in survival training? Can’t be picky. Food is food. If there is food, you eat the fucking food.”
Jack pulled out the straw, tilted his head back and squirted the remaining goop into his mouth and slammed the empty packet on the table.
Right, if that was going to be the tone of their interactions…
Steven decided to get on with the program for today.
“We need to agree on our priorities. First, we’ll need to find the solar array. Xander’s locality map shows it in the middle of the clearing outside.”
“Ex-clearing,” Luciane said over her tea. “Everything outside is covered under a carpet of those fucking slippery plants.”
“Wouldn’t the panels be on the roof?” Rollo asked.
“In some places, yes, but these prefab units aren’t strong enough to support their weight.”
“So we’re going to be gardeners on this planet,” Rollo said.
“To get us going, yes. If we have no power, our stay here will be uncomfortable and brief. Xander says there are tools in the storage room.”
“Tools?” Rollo said, frowning at Steven.
“Shovels and rakes and stuff.”
“I don’t want to shovel and rake this shit,” Luciane said. “I want to burn it to the ground, with flamethrowers and lasers.”
