Authors: Timothy H. Scott
She spoke, but the words came out shaking and unsure. “Why not? Why can’t I be here? Huh? I have a right to be here and besides, I’m here now so there’s nothing we can change about that.” She said, convincing herself towards the end that her father did the right thing, what any father would do, right?
He was about to walk back into the supply closet when the question stabbed into him, and he pounced on the opportunity to put her in her place. He turned and addressed her with a tone of authority, evoking the name of the president as if to kill any doubt as to why she shouldn’t be here. “President Koung specifically used Executive Order 13 to get Academy students onto the shuttles. Only students who were immune could go. Can you imagine why they wouldn’t want someone here that was going to get sick and die as soon as they landed?”
Disgusted, he disappeared into the supply closet to busy himself. She picked her book off the floor and retired into the stasis chamber, bundling herself as best she could to fight the chill in the air until she fell asleep.
Josh was fatigued from the long day, but he wanted to take quick inventory of the entire supply room before going to bed. They had everything they needed to survive for a couple months, maybe three if they were lucky. He exaggerated to Leah the extent of their supply problem by telling her they only had a months worth, hoping it would scare some sense into her. More importantly he had tools. A lot of tools. It was clear the supplies were a temporary solution to a long term problem. They’d have to learn to survive entirely on what the planet offered, and their own abilities. Leah would only exacerbate this challenge to an incredible degree.
They spent the rest of the evening separated, with Josh fiddling in the supply room and Leah reading and praying before they both fell asleep in their respective rooms.
The next morning Leah awoke to gunshots. They were single shots paced evenly apart and the reports echoed back and forth within the enclosed valley. She poked her head out of the shuttle and saw Josh, bundled up and resting the rifle on a boulder and firing at a distant object. She could see the off-color white of the target against the brown
bark of a lone tree about one
hundred yards distant. He fired again. She watched him reload.
Josh felt her presence but only offered a dismissive glance at her before turning his attention back to the rifle. He tweaked the gun sight and resumed his target practice. Leah refused to be intimidated by him, however, and considering their circumstances, she also felt it foolish to be so.
“What are you doing?” She asked right as Josh was about to fire again. He stopped short and threw an irritated look over his shoulder before aiming again. Josh fired three more paced shots. There was plenty of ammo stockpiled in the shuttle and ensuring his sights were dialed in correctly was important enough to spend time with target practice.
“Making sure I don’t miss.”
“Oh. Eat any breakfast?”
Two more shots. He didn’t answer. Leah disappeared back into the shuttle. Josh, satisfied the rifle was balanced and sighted, placed it inside a leather case and rested it on the rock before sitting down to examine the photos he had taken yesterday. He wanted to get a good idea of their surroundings, but now that they appeared to be elbow deep in the mountains, he hoped one of the photos would give up some minor detail that would lead them to a river or a lake, or an easier path to the foothills.
The tablet that held the photos was powered with energy that would soon be in short supply, and then gone forever. The engine core of the shuttle was damaged beyond repair from the landing, and without it no extra power would be generated. Finding out any details in those photos was worth burning up what energy that was left in the tablet. He slid a gloved finger over the screen and moved the images around, zooming in and out, and examining every trace detail.
Every image came up empty. There was nothing but a sea of trees encircled by mountains. Surely there would be water somewhere, but it was too risky to strike out blindly. He couldn’t take Leah with him, and if he became injured or lost, he held no illusion that she wouldn’t be able to help him. The thought of death didn’t bother him as much as all the excruciating pain that would lead up to it as he lay alone in the middle of nowhere. Broken leg, hypothermia, followed by getting eaten alive by some night bound alien creature and ending with eyes pecked out by ravenous birds. He figured the last part was kind of cool, considering he wouldn’t be alive to feel it anyway, and flashed a dark smile at the thought of Leah finding him like that just a day too late. Good luck without me!
Then something caught his eye in image CA887. He zoomed in to the spot. It wasn’t water, but there was something unnatural about its contour compared to the rest of the tree line. The object jutted out from the thick of trees like an antenna. It could be an oddly shaped part of a tree growing upwards or an optical illusion based on the angle of the Terra when it snapped the photo.
Josh nearly jumped out of his skin when Leah approached, “Christ, don’t creep up on me like that. What’d you do, levitate over here?” She was standing nearly on top of him when he noticed her. He squinted as he looked up, the sun situated behind her back. From his spot she appeared even taller and lankier than usual.
“Breakfast,” she said plainly, sticking the food out in front of him. It wasn’t an energy bar. It actually looked like a real meal with different types of food on it. Steam wafted off the egg-like substance that was plopped in the middle. Some rectangular piece of starch sat on the edge, and a green blob oozed next to it.
He took it and then chastised her, “This is too much. Next time make the same amount but we’ll split it. Can’t be eating like this everyday or we’ll run out of food.”
“Sorry. Thought you could use a warm meal to start the day.”
He gave her a cockeyed look as he chewed. She really thought this was some kind of camping trip.
She reached for the plate, “Ok, well give it back to me then if you don’t want it.”
He pulled the food closer to him. “This isn’t the Westbound. You’ll be surprised how fast we’ll run out of things. No need for this to go to waste so, for next time ... just keep it in mind.”
What he wanted to tell her was that he was ravenous and could eat three of these plates. His instructors had taught him about the varying and unpredictable effects prolonged stasis could have on the body, and each person would be affected in different ways. It was clear that severe hunger pangs was one side effect he was suffering from that she wasn’t.
“Tell me something,” she said with a pitch of curiosity. “Couldn’t they have given you a better gun? That thing belongs in a museum!”
He sighed, inconvenienced with the fact he must explain such juvenile inquisitions. “It’s because,” he said, ready to expound on the technical ramifications of placing a highly sophisticated piece of equipment into stasis over a period of centuries, or millennia, but then decided to keep his explanation as simple as possible. “Things break. This uses basic machine parts that can be easily assembled and disassembled, and the ammunition doesn’t require an external power source, which, as you can see, is no longer available to us. It’d be pretty fucking useless, right? Sort of like some other things around here.”
Josh made sure his last thought was not lost on her, and Leah simply turned back to the shuttle without a word. Her kindness in bringing him some hot food briefly changed the way he looked at her, but he had shaken the feeling just as fast as it had come. Her ability to warm up highly processed, packaged space food may have seemed to be a useful task she set herself upon to do, but Josh needed a soldier here, not a cook. Despite his latent attraction to her, his desire to emotionally pursue a woman had been crushed by the Academy long ago. Emotions cloud judgment and put lives at risk.
After he finished eating he wasted no time in making his way to the strange object. He calculated a route using the tablet, computing the relative position of the camera to the distance of the object and the tablet computed a roughly three hour roundtrip hike, moving at an average pace of 5.5 miles per hour. This would be an exhausting hike in his current state, and to keep up that pace would nearly be impossible. He was honest with himself and assumed the trip would take at least five hours roundtrip. Josh grabbed his gun before heading to the shuttle to pack supplies. Leah was there, rifling through the supply closet.
“What are you doing?” He asked as he stood over her while she sat with her skinny, long legs stuck out in front of her and packages lying all about.
“Organizing,” she said, looking up over her shoulder at him as she talked. “I’m creating an inventory of every item we have and separating them by category. Foodstuffs here, clothing here, tools here...”
“It’s already organized. They didn’t just throw all this shit in here for us at the last minute. Every container is marked.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. The food, for example, is all vacuum sealed in these containers but they aren’t categorized. You want chicken? Good luck finding it. I’m going to make it ... easier.” She flashed a smile and winked at him.
“I have something better for you to do. See that container right there?” He waited for her to find it. “Okay, open it. Good. Grab that silver package and open it up. It’s a thermal wrap. While I’m gone I need you to seal the inside of this shuttle as best you can with it, got it? We can’t afford to sleep every night in subzero temperatures.”
“How does it go on?”
“You’ll figure it out,” he started to leave.
“How much do I put on? Should we save some?”
He mumbled something obscene and kept on walking, but then something occurred to him to tell her just in case she really was that dense. “Just don’t cover the door, okay? Or the vent shaft. God forbid you suffocate before I get back.”
“Where are you going?” She asked, jumping up and following him out of the room. Leah stood in the hallway and waited for his response.
Josh fixed his gloves on and said. “For a hike. I’ll be gone for a few hours.”
“What if you get lost, or hurt? How am I supposed to find you?”
He sighed and looked at her with tired eyes, “You don’t. Chances are if I’m not back by tonight I’m probably dead, so you might as well just kill yourself and get this whole fucking charade over with.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“I’m not the one who isn’t supposed to be here. I don’t even want to be here, especially with you. If you’d had gone to the academy, you’d be capable of coming with me and I wouldn’t have to look after you like an infant. Instead, you just stay here and play dollhouse with our supplies and read your completely and utterly useless book.” His eyes ran up and down the length of her body. “At least clean yourself up before I get back.”
With that he left for the hike and became increasingly despondent over their situation. It was a sheer stroke of cosmic injustice, a dark fate leveled against mankind that he would be paired with an invalid. He knew her type from his studies and the rumors about civvies and how they lived outside of the academy. She was coddled, naive, the type that expects life to part before her every step whether in good deed or in error. The type of person that expects everything and gives nothing.
Somehow, in Leah’s infantile mind, it would all work out no matter what. Some people called this faith. Josh understood it lowered their probability of success to nearly zero percent.
Josh could feel the temperature
fall by the minute as he climbed over rocks and pushed through skeletal undergrowth that reached up from the ground like elongated fingers. He stopped for a rest to get his bearings, and the air about him was still. Silent. The tall, ancient pine trees stood all around him like hairs upon an ungodly beast, he a mere flea crawling amongst them. Occasionally the tick tack sound of a dry pine cone would make its way down from a high branch until it thudded onto a bed of dry needles.
Josh pulled out his tablet and checked his progress. He was still about thirty minutes away. After drinking some water
,
Josh noticed something crawling along his glove. A bug.
He gently brought his arm up to examine it closer. It crawled steadily to the edge of his finger when he flipped his hand so it could continue. It was some type of black beetle, maybe a black turpentine, but it had a colored design on its back, a camouflage that wasn’t supposed to be there. Not from what he knew of them from his studies, anyway.
Josh put the bug down on the log and continued hiking. His muscles were not at full strength, but he had plenty of energy. His body felt heavy and cumbersome as he clamored up hills and through tangled foliage. He pressed forward though as the thought of going back, accomplishing nothing, would not sit well with his ego in the company of Leah.
Besides, the shuttle was a temporary shelter and he had little time to waste assessing their surroundings. They would need to relocate soon and set up a more permanent camp. He hadn’t done his celestial readings yet, but right now he was going on the assumption that winter in this region was just beginning as there was no trace of snow yet.
Josh ran into his first major obstacle, a deep gully that cut through the forest like a scar. From its eroded edges, the exposed roots of trees stuck out in every direction like petrified snakes. What would have been a bubbly creek in warmer climes now stretched along the bottom of the gully as a thin icy trail. It was a good fifty feet down, maybe thirty feet across and the soil appeared loose and unstable along the edges. He checked the length of the gully to his left and right to see for any fallen trees that would let him walk over. No luck.
He didn’t want to waste any more time by wandering one way or the other for a place to cross. The thought of slipping down and breaking a leg didn’t seem too useful either, but he didn’t want to spend any more time out here than necessary. Besides, maybe he’d get lucky and break his neck in a fall and not have to worry about anything.
Josh pulled out a rope from his pack and tied the end as a slipknot, found a strong looking branch overhanging the gully and took a good angle at tossing the loop until it latched on.
“This is pretty fucking stupid,” he muttered as he secured the pack and rifle tight to his body. He wrapped the end of the rope around his right hand until it was taut above his head. He gave it a few hard yanks and then shoved hard off the base of a tree, and the branch complained under the newfound weight, swinging like a pendulum underneath it.
He swung fast, and he felt the branch bend with his weight as he crossed over the chasm. Just as he reached the other side there was a sharp crack, and he went into free fall. He slammed hard against the side of the gully and reached for something to grasp as he slid down. The soft soil gave away under him like sand and he began to slip. The loss of control over his body and his sudden realization that he might not be able to prevent himself from careening down to the rocks below sent a surge of fear up from the pit of his stomach.
His hand struck out in desperation to arrest his slide, and he grabbed onto an exposed root. Rocks and soil tumbled down below him, and he could taste blood and dirt in his mouth. At the bottom of the gully his rope was strewn out like a snake with the broken tree limb still attached.
He gripped the root with both hands and pulled his entire weight up until he could reach another root, and in this way he ascended until he rolled over onto solid ground. He lay there to catch his breath and let the stupidity of that decision wash over him. How the hell am I going to get back over?
He’d figure that out when the time came. He checked his tablet and according to his mapping estimates, he wasn’t far from his destination. From here on he walked carefully, pausing, watching, and using his compact binoculars to scan ahead. He couldn’t find anything. It was supposed to be here, but there was nothing. He plotted a new, shorter route a bit further in case the original estimate was off and continued.
Then it came upon him like an ambush, appearing out of nowhere, and Josh dove into cover behind a tree and pulled his rifle to his front. His hands shook as he rested the barrel on top of a log and took aim. Heavy, thick snowflakes began to fall.
There it was. Some type of small structure. Concrete, or metal. Like a bunker. The object he had seen in the photo was sticking up from the top of the bunker like an antenna, except at first glance it appeared as a long stick that blended with the trees. The snow accumulated on a strange object on the ground that was shaped like a body.
It was sitting erect against a tree only a dozen feet away from the bunker, as if it had sat down to rest and never got up. The snowfall was making it difficult to see anything in detail. Josh pulled his rifle around and sat with his back against his cover to consider his next move.
Josh glanced back from where he had just come and again dreaded the thought of returning with nothing. He had little time to spare here and needed to act, but he feared violence by approaching the bunker. Nobody constructs a well camouflaged bunker made of concrete for a hunting blind, unless whatever they were hunting was extremely dangerous. The bunker was designed to withstand combat, plain and simple, and whatever is lying there in the snow either was from the bunker or had tried attacking it.
There still could be someone in the bunker, but he was rapidly deducing that was unlikely. Whatever happened here was over and the occupants dead or gone. Josh stared at the opening in the bunker wall, a two foot slit that ran along the base of the forest floor and which had full view of Josh’s approach. Had there been someone in there watching he’d be dead by now.
The heavy snowfall threatened to accumulate a foot per hour, making an already difficult trip back to the shuttle into a nightmare. The last thing he had anticipated finding was intelligent design, as that brought with it the worst type of scenario for he and Leah. An uninhabited planet was one kind of ordeal, but the variables involved with intelligent beings were limitless and far deadlier than facing nature alone. Of course, there was the possibility that whatever beings existed here were peaceful in nature, but his distinct cynicism of the human race led him to rule that out completely. If they are anything like us I better shoot first.
Josh stood and approached the bunker with the barrel end of his rifle following his eyesight and ready to kill anything that moved. The wind had died and the snow was soft as air as his boots stepped through it, making measured progress towards the bunker. He was close enough now to make out what was lying against the tree. Josh kneeled slightly and peered at it as his heart raced. It was some kind of machine, sitting, staring straight at nothing. He moved closer until only a few feet away, keeping the rifle leveled at its chest.
There were legs, and arms. He could see it clearly now. The head was more like a triangular shape with rounded edges, and no distinct facial features. There was some kind of symbol or insignia on its shoulder and chest that resembled a national flag, but he didn’t recognize the country.
The metal chassis bore scorch marks, spotted with small holes and corroded metal. Josh figured it had been on the losing end of the fight and was inactivated a long time ago. A kind of moss had developed over many of its limbs and small, wiry vines had curled themselves around the body. He glanced over to the bunker.
There was a series of steps that led below ground level and preceded a door that was partially open. Maybe two machines at most could have fit in there. This was a military outpost. The question now was who created the machines and for what purpose? Josh would need to locate whoever had fought this machine to find that answer.
As he stood he took a step back and didn’t see the dry branch and his weight snapped it in half. He cursed himself for being clumsy, glancing at the machine before heading towards the bunker to investigate.
A barely audible hum stirred the air, stopping Josh in his tracks. His mouth went dry, and he wanted to turn around but already knew what awaited him, and the fear paralyzed him.
The machines arms slowly lifted off the ground, ripping away the dry vines with its mechanical fingers. It placed one arm down to brace itself, and lifted its body from the ground and stood fully. Josh forced himself around and faced the alien creature which now stood in a defensive posture, its slatted eyes flickering as if identifying a target, its entire body moving subtly as if it were human.
The machine blasted the air with
a
deafening concussion as it raised an arm at Josh. Josh f
ired from the hip. A projectil
e from the machine shot past his face. Josh’s
bullets
penetrated in several spots, felling the machine to its knees as it struggled to regain itself.
Then he turned and ran. He slung the rifle without missing a step and pushed hard, suddenly and entirely focused as the elite student of the academy he was trained to be. The adrenaline ran through him as he sprinted and leapt over fallen branches and bounded up and over rocks. It wasn’t until he reached the gully that he stopped. Trapped, he took a defensive position and aimed his rifle out into the forest and waited.