Almost against his wishes, Landry drew himself up and took a deep breath.
“All right. I’ll do it. What’s the plan?”
Chapter 3
PSD 29-212: 0731 hours
The scout hangar wasn’t far away, and there was no time for Landry to overthink the situation. He didn’t
want
to overthink the situation. He knew that the more he considered the ramifications of what he and Gus were about to do, the less likely it was that he would go through with it.
It was a serious breach of protocol, enough to get him sent home permanently. But in the end, what did he have to lose? What would he miss about the endless routine of being on the outpost, were it all to come to an end?
But he wasn’t sure he could handle heading back to Earth again either. The memories would come flooding back if he was forced to return. He would inevitably be forced to face up to the things he’d left behind, and that wasn’t going to be pleasant.
That was what scared him the most.
“I figured we’d take Seven,” Gus was saying as he opened the door to the hangar. “She’s a good bird. I’ve taken her out a few times lately—”
“Yeah, whatever,” Landry said. “I don’t care which scout we steal.”
“
Borrow.
”
“That’s what I meant.”
With no active missions scheduled, the hangar was shrouded in gloom, and Gus flicked one of the switches on a nearby panel so they could see. A single bank of lights activated at the far end of the room, providing meager illumination, but it was enough for them to see what they were doing.
He didn’t say as much, but it was clear that Gus was trying to attract as little attention as possible by keeping most of the hangar dark.
As they walked toward Scout Seven, Landry looked up at the bulky shapes of the craft around them, close to fifteen in all. Each was the same model as the last: Himura Seagulls. Landry had always liked the design of the craft. They were reliable, and the troubleshooting was generally easy to follow in the uncommon event of a breakdown. Powering the ‘gulls were four arcjet thrusters using vector control for vertical takeoffs and landings (or VTOL as they referred to it around here). There were two on the rear and one on each flank, subtly incorporated into the sleek outer hull. The cockpit seated two occupants, pilot in front and passenger behind. The nacelle was predominantly a pearlescent white, and nose to tail it was 13.2 meters long.
All in all, a neat little package.
And Landry and Gus were about to seriously maim one.
“What’s in the toolkit?” Gus said, glancing down at the bag in Landry’s hand.
“All the stuff I need.”
“I heard a rumor that you Optechs only ever use gaffer tape when you fix things around here.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s in the bag. One big roll of gaff.”
“Gaff to the rescue, huh?”
“Gaff to the rescue.”
“Wish it were that easy being a pilot, man,” Gus said wistfully. “You should step into my shoes for a few—”
“I have something in the bag for people who talk too much garbage, by the way,” Landry said. “It’s very effective.”
“What is it?”
“Gaffer tape.”
“Oh. I guess I’ll zip it, then.” They reached a scout, which had a weathered number seven stenciled on the side. Gus slapped the hull affectionately. “Here she is.”
Landry dropped his toolkit on the floor and rummaged inside, bringing out a compact electric screwdriver. He felt his way along the craft as he got his bearings.
“Okay, the transponder’s under this panel,” he said after a moment. “Go and find something we can hide it in until we get back.”
“Okay.”
Gus disappeared into the gloomy recesses of the hangar while Landry got to work on the panel. He had sure fingers and made quick work of it, getting inside without too much difficulty. The transponder was buried beneath a couple of other boards, and that was where things slowed down. Within a few minutes he’d cleared the area around the transponder, but before he could unfasten it, a thudding noise echoed around the hangar.
Someone had come in through the door.
“Who’s there?”
A woman’s voice. Landry thought he recognized it.
“Cait?” he said.
“Yeah. Who’s that?”
“It’s Landry.”
Cait’s silhouette shifted as she tried to locate him in the gloom. “Landry, what are you doing in here with the lights off?”
He dropped the screwdriver back in the bag and began to walk toward her. “Just catching up on some overdue patch-ups,” he said casually. “No biggie.”
Cait glared at him skeptically as he neared her. She was wearing her short blonde hair tied back in a little spout ponytail. Under her navy blue work coveralls she possessed a thin frame, but there was a wiry toughness about her. An Optech like Landry, she carried out the physically demanding vocation without fuss.
Still, Landry didn’t like her. She seemed normal enough around the rest of the Optech clique, but she resented that he was her superior, and often found excuses to pick apart his performance. In fact, she could be a downright nuisance at times.
Wouldn’t you just love to see me in trouble?
Landry thought.
“What patch-ups?” Cait said. “These Seagulls got a clean bill of health three days ago, and they haven’t been out since.”
Landry scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “Well, that’s the thing. One of the pilots has been reporting to me that his transponder has been dropping out intermittently, so I thought I’d take a look.”
“In the middle of all the stuff we have to do before the Marines lift off? Are you insane?”
Landry gave her a patient smile. “Why don’t you head over to the workshop and get started? I’ll be along—”
There was a noise behind them, something being kicked over in the darkness, and Gus appeared in his EVA suit, standing there stupidly with a small grey box clutched in his hands.
“Uh, hi,” he said.
“What are you doing there, Gus?” Landry said, grating his teeth and nodding surreptitiously toward Cait.
“Thought I’d get suited up and uh . . .” He shrugged uselessly. “Didn’t hear we had a visitor.”
Cait rounded on Landry. “Why is there a pilot suited up for an excursion? What’s going on? Did OC sanction this?”
“He’s goofing around, don’t worry about it,” Landry said. He gripped her by the shoulder and turned her toward the door, propelling her with a hand on her back. “I’ll see you at the workshop.”
She scowled and shrugged his hand away, then reached for the door handle. Glancing back at the two of them, she gave them a disdainful shake of her head, and left without another word.
“Nice work, spaceman,” Landry said as he walked back toward Gus. Gus glanced down sheepishly at his suit. “What were you thinking?”
“I was just getting ready,” Gus said. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Got a suit prepped for you, too.”
“Yeah, great. I thought you were going to find somewhere to put the transponder.”
“I did,” Gus said. “Right here.” He held up the container he’d been carrying, a generic-looking grey box about the size of a cinder block.
“That? It looks like somebody’s lunch box.”
“It was all I could find.”
“Gus, someone’s going to come in here looking for lunch and ending up finding the transponder. I guarantee it.”
“Just get the transponder and put it in here, huh? We’ll be back before lunch, easy.”
Landry glanced back at the door to the hangar, uneasy about the exchange with Cait.
“Yeah, we better be.”
Chapter 4
PSD 29-212: 0802 hours
Landry fidgeted inside his EVA suit, attempting to get comfortable within the cramped confines of the scout’s cockpit. Ahead of him and slightly lower down sat Gus at the flight controls, busily flipping switches on the avionics panel as the Seagull powered up. Landry glanced back toward the hangar entrance, but Cait had not returned.
Maybe she’ll just forget about it.
“Yeah, right,” he muttered.
“You say something?” Gus said over his comms, turning his head and raising his voice over the noise of the engines.
“Nothing.”
Gus gave a thumbs up, and in a moment the scout began to trundle forward and out of the hangar. The space narrowed and the ceiling got lower as they continued, then a door behind them lowered. There was a loud hissing sound around them as the airlock cycled the oxygen, and then the bay doors opened out on the glinting red landscape of Proc-One. Landry heard the ship’s AI beep as it came online, but Gus reached out and shut it down before it could complete its boot up sequence.
“Okay, we’re good,” Gus said. “Hang onto your breakfast.”
The engines rotated into the vertical position and thrust increased. Then the landing gear retracted and the scout lifted into the air and began to skim across the ground. The airlock disappeared behind them, and then suddenly they were rocketing forward, kicking up plumes of red sand and dust as they surged along.
“Whoa!” Landry exclaimed, his hands digging into the edges of his seat involuntarily. “You gonna pull her up anytime soon, man?”
“No can do, buddy. We’ve gotta keep this bird low. Don’t want anything showing up on radar.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot we were on a suicide mission.”
Gus laughed. “Don’t sweat it, Landry. I’ve got this.”
Landry turned his head and looked out across the desolate landscape, at the sun hanging low in the red-tinged morning sky. Around here, morning was a loose term—Procyon was in fact a binary system, consisting of a larger star Procyon A, and a smaller companion white dwarf Procyon B—and so the classifications of night, day, dusk, and dawn that were used on Earth did not strictly apply. It was rare for the planet to be in complete darkness. Usually at least one of the Procyon stars was visible at any given time, and even though Procyon B gave off far less light, the evening was too bright to be considered night. Instead, Proc-One went from daylight to a kind of dusk and then back to daylight again.
The binary nature of the system also played havoc with the planet’s orbit, resulting in harsh changes in climate at different times of the year. This instability meant that life had never taken hold on the planet’s surface, and never would.
Only invaders like humans and the Argoni would ever walk the surface
, Landry thought.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Gus said, interrupting Landry’s reverie.
“Huh?”
“Check it out.” Gus pointed to where both Procyon A and B were rising over the horizon. “This is an amazing place, Landry.”
“Funny. It always seemed like a dead rock to me.”
“Nah, man. We’re privileged to be here.” He adjusted the attitude of the scout as they passed over a hill, then dipped downward into the valley on the other side. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t leave. To be given the honor of looking out at the glory of something like this . . .” He trailed off, then a moment later began again with renewed vigor. “Can you imagine what it would be like if there was no war? If we were just free to explore this place instead of spending every waking moment trying to repel the Toads?”
“Not really.”
“I mean, it was just dumb luck we came across those critters. Think about it. Man creates the fold engine, and we gain the ability to bend space. Then, a little way down the track, we jump to, uh . . .”
“Gliese Four-Twelve,” Landry supplied.
“Yeah, Gliese Four-Twelve. We jump to Gliese Four-Twelve, and a Toad warship just happens to be there and follows us back to Earth. Bam! The war begins.”
“Thanks for the history lesson.”
“No, that’s not what I’m getting at. What I mean is, if that Toad warship hadn’t been there when we folded through to Gliese Four-Twelve, or we’d chosen a different system . . . we might have been living in peace all of these years. You and I might be taking a joyride across an unexplored planet right now instead of worrying about where the next attack was coming from.”
“Hey, don’t go all mushy on me, huh?” Landry said.
“Not a chance.” Gus turned to look at him, but couldn’t quite get his head around far enough to see him. “It’s just a hypothetical.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Landry said. He’d often wondered the same thing himself—what their lives might have been like had humans not invented the fold engine and stumbled out into the depths of space, attracting the attention of a hostile species that had started a war with Earth without any attempt to communicate—but there was no point daydreaming about it. That just wasn’t reality.
“Hey, I want to thank you for doing this, Landry,” Gus said awkwardly, unsure how to broach the topic of his gratitude. “For real. I know you’re taking a big chance. I won’t forget it.”
“Well, you
are
my second best friend in the whole outpost, you know.”
“Right after the guy with the beard?”
“You got it.”
Gus adjusted his heading, and they continued to rocket along just above the surface. Landry watched it all go by, but try as he might, he couldn’t see the beauty in it. He couldn’t see the infinite wonder of the alien world. Maybe he was just too jaded, too pessimistic.
Or maybe he’d just lost the ability to see the beauty in anything.
“Okay, I’ve got visual on the dead array,” Gus was saying. “Ten o’clock. Five, maybe six clicks ahead.”
Landry craned his neck, spotting the tall spire of metal glinting in the sunlight. He activated the camera on his helmet, which in turn splashed an image overlay on the inside of his visor. The view before him grew to 4x and then 8x magnification, greatly enhancing the detail of the dusty metal plating of the array. Ghostly green numerals flicked across the HUD, displaying approximate distance along with a number of other parameters.
“Yeah. Got it.”
“The survey area where I left the storage module should be a couple of clicks north of that. We should be able to spot it, as long as it hasn’t been covered in dust already.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
Gus turned the scout and they made their way north, weaving between a cluster of boulders with precision. He eased back on the power and they slowed to a more gentle cruising speed as they tried to locate their target.
“See anything yet?” Gus said.
“No.” Landry adjusted his camera magnification again, then leaned forward as he tried to get a better view of the terrain. His visor bumped sharply against the acrylic of the cockpit canopy, and he sat up. “Y’know, this would be a lot easier if we had some more altitude.”
“Like I said, that’s not an option,” Gus said. “We have to play some limbo here.”
“Play what?”
“Limbo, man. You know the game where someone holds a bar and you have to try to walk underneath it? You have to keep low—” He stopped. “Wait, there it is! Yeah, I see it. Eleven o’clock.”
“I don’t see anything but rock.”
“That’s it! That’s the storage module. Let me just swing around here . . .” Gus made another sharp turn, then began to curve the scout around to the east, still hugging the terrain. “See it? It should be in your—”
There was a flash of something dark from below, something that stood out against the ubiquitous red landscape around them, and then there was a crashing noise, and Landry was thrown against the side of the cockpit. He heard screeching and the world seemed to spin in every direction.
Alarms and sirens blared, and lights in the cockpit flashed.
Landry screamed.
“What the—?”
“We’re hit, we’re hit.” Landry heard Gus’s voice. The guy sounded insanely calm and in control to Landry. “Losing guidance systems, we’re going in.”
“Gus, what’s going—?”
“Brace for impact.” The world was still rotating at nauseating speed, and getting faster. “Hold on, Landry.”
Chaos. This was insane, Landry thought. They were crashing? How did this happen?
Am I going to die?
Landry thought wildly.
The ground rushed up, and there was no time for Landry to think of anything else.