Chapter 5
PSD 29-212: 1545 hours
Landry clawed his way out of the black sludge that permeated his mind, coming back to consciousness gradually, the veil of darkness drawing away one layer at time. For a while, he had no idea where he was, or what was going on. There was just the pounding in his head and a relentless throbbing sensation that seemed to course down his spine and radiate out through his eyeballs like jagged shards of glass.
He clutched at his temple, but his hand struck his visor instead.
He was in an EVA suit.
The crash.
He cursed to himself.
The crash!
Landry scrambled upward into a sitting position, his pain temporarily forgotten. He was still in the rear cockpit of the scout, but he was alone. The cockpit canopy had been partially snapped from its mounts, and it lay ajar, allowing the noxious atmosphere of Proc-One into the cockpit.
Good thing I’m wearing my EVA.
“Hey, Gus?” Landry said, wincing as the sound of his own voice inside the helmet sent his headache into another paroxysm of pain. He glanced around but saw no sign of his pilot. “Where are you?”
Gus did not respond. Outside, Landry could see dark tendrils of smoke trailing into the air around the scout. As he pushed himself forward, he noted that there was a decided slant in the craft’s orientation, angling heavily to the left.
It was a miracle the scout hadn’t broken up completely, Landry realized. They’d probably been saved by the fact they’d been at low altitude when hit. Maybe they’d skimmed the ground when they’d gone down instead of dropping like a stone.
Gus must have woken up first, climbed out for a look around. That would explain it.
“Gus? Are you hearing me on comms? Advise of your position, over.”
Landry moved forward, pushing the canopy upward to squeeze past the pilot’s seat. It wasn’t an easy task in his bulky suit, and he ended up tumbling forward into Gus’s empty chair.
“Gah. Get a grip.” He sat up, and something outside caught his eye.
It was Gus, lying face down in the dirt in his EVA suit.
“Hey! Gus?” There was still no response. He pushed urgently at the canopy, then slid outside. He tumbled roughly onto the dirt.
Had Gus been thrown clear during the crash?
he wondered. That must have been it. He was probably out cold.
“Hey, no time for sleeping, buddy. We’ve got a situation here.” He scrambled across the ground and reached for Gus’s shoulder, then began to turn him over. “Nice landing, by the way—”
Landry stopped. Gus’s visor had been smashed apart, a jagged, gaping hole running vertically down its center. Rivulets of dried blood ran from his scalp, and his skin was pale and blue, his lips almost black.
Landry cried out and leapt backward, staring in horror at his friend.
Gus was dead. He was
dead.
His EVA suit was shredded, torn apart down the center. There was a horrendous gash in his chest, and blood . . . so much blood. His oxygen tank was also ruptured, its contents scattered to the winds.
My only friend in this world is gone
, Landry thought. He choked back a sob and squeezed his eyes shut.
Landry thought of Gus’s family, the people who were financially dependent on him, all the way back on Earth. This would destroy them.
He opened his eyes again, feeling ill.
Poor Gus
, he thought.
He must have drawn the short straw, been thrown clear of the cockpit when it hit the ground.
And yet, on the ground nearby, Landry could see footprints that weren’t his, leading from the scout to where he now crouched.
So had Gus survived the crash
, he wondered,
then walked out here and died?
He looked back at his dead friend one more time.
Not with those injuries. He wouldn’t have been walking anywhere with that massive hole in his chest.
And there’s no blood in the cockpit, either.
Landry touched the edge of the hole in Gus’s suit.
Are those gash marks? Did something attack him out here?
Landry bit his lip, tried to suppress his grief and the rising sense of panic that had begun to grip him. He looked around, wondering what he was going to do.
Think. Assess the damage.
“This is
not happening!
” he shouted at nothing in particular.
Good idea, Landry. Take out your frustration on a few boulders. That should help things along.
He took a deep breath and tried to collect his thoughts. He had eight hours of air in his oxygen tank, plenty of time to figure out a plan. He just needed to—
Something seemed off, he thought. Something wasn’t right. He glanced about again and took a few stumbling steps away from the wreck.
The
light
. It was all wrong.
He looked up at the sky, saw Procyon A dipping toward the horizon. It was late afternoon.
How long was I out for?
Landry called up the oxygen readout on his HUD and checked the digits. He dropped his wrist, took a deep breath, then looked at it again.
Yup. That’s what I thought it said first time.
Seven percent of O
2
left. Thirty minutes, maybe a bit more. That’s it.
“Okay. I wasn’t completely screwed before, but now . . .”
He’d been knocked out for hours, not minutes as he’d first thought.
He turned back to the scout, and another surprise was waiting for him.
Only half of the ship was there. He realized the other half must have been ripped off in the explosion.
“What exactly happened up there?” he said to himself.
There was only silence as a late afternoon breeze that rippled across the ruddy landscape, sweeping fine grains of sand against his visor.
Okay, think. Thirty minutes. You have thirty minutes to do something. What are the options?
He turned in a slow circle.
Definitely can’t walk back to the outpost from here. Can’t fix the ship.
Obviously.
Signal for help?
With frickin’
what?
Smoke signals?
Yeah, they’ll definitely see those from three hundred clicks away.
The only thing that could communicate over that distance was the scout comms unit, but it’s out of commission—
An idea came to him, along with a modicum of hope.
If the comms unit is still intact somehow, and I could reroute a different power source to it, could I get it working?
Not without the antenna.
His mind was racing, recalling the design of the Seagull. The antenna was located in the rear of the ship. The part of the ship that had disappeared.
He turned again, scanning the horizon.
The other part of the ship should be easy to spot against the red landscape
, he figured,
but there—
Then he saw it—a thin trail of smoke over a nearby ridge. That was where the aft section must have come down.
Get the antenna. Get back here and wire it up to the comms unit. Find another power source. Simple.
He skirted around the side of the wreck, bounding in his EVA suit over a knee-high boulder with the grace of pregnant cow, adrenaline coursing through his veins, his headache forgotten.
Chapter 6
Present Day
PSD 29-212: 1608 hours
Landry hadn’t blacked out after being steamrolled by the Argoni. That was something, at least, he figured. For a moment he thought he had, but, as it turned out, he’d only been momentarily dazed when he’d face-planted after being knocked from his feet. As he lay there regathering his wits, he heard the Toad’s footsteps receding as it ran away with the comms module, and that realization helped to brush away the last of the cobwebs from his mind.
He knew he couldn’t let it get away.
He struggled to his feet, then stood there wobbling as he fought to regain his equilibrium.
The Argoni wasn’t anywhere he could see.
He looked about frantically, certain that he had lost all sense of direction when he’d been knocked on his butt. He saw the wreckage of the scout down the slope, the footprints left by the Argoni in the dirt. He followed them over the crest of the ridge, but after a few paces, they abruptly ended.
What in the . . . ?
Okay, so this thing is the size of a Sumo wrestler, can run like an Olympic sprinter, and also make itself vanish at will.
That is
so
unfair.
But as he stood there, Landry figured out what had happened. The final footprint in the trail was deeper than the rest, as if the Toad had exerted more effort on that last step.
As if it had
jumped
.
Not far away, there was a cluster of knee-high and waist-high boulders that dotted the landscape. He figured the Toad must have leapt onto them and used them like stepping stones in order to mask its escape route.
But if that were the case, Landry should still have been able to see it out there. He had a wide-open view in most directions for hundreds of meters, and yet the Argoni was nowhere in sight.
“It’s still out there,” he said to himself. “It’s hiding. Behind a boulder. Waiting.”
He shifted uneasily, rubbing gingerly at the point of his shoulder, the place that had borne the brunt of his collision with the Argoni.
He wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that the Argoni hadn’t gotten away completely.
On the one hand, that meant there was still a chance of getting the antenna back. On the other, he might have to face up against the creature again.
The linebacker from hell.
It had killed Gus. He knew that for certain. The injuries Gus had sustained weren’t consistent with a crash. The Argoni had come looking for them, and had used that chitinous blade to crack Gus open and slice him up.
It must have missed Landry lying in the cockpit somehow. He’d lucked out. But it wasn’t going away for good. It would come back for him.
“Hey!” he yelled, “I know you’re there!” He felt like a scared little kid cowering in his bed at night, screaming at an imaginary monster in the dark. “Step out and I’ll bust you up!”
Good job, Landry. It must be shaking in its size twenty-six boots right now.
He checked his oxygen supply again and saw that he was down to three percent, barely fifteen minutes. And here he was wasting his breath yelling at a bunch of rocks.
Landry moved forward, retracing the footprints in the dirt left by the alien. He clambered up onto a boulder, then jumped awkwardly to the next, trying to figure out which path it might have taken.
He found that it wasn’t an easy job hopping around. Not in the EVA suit.
The Toad was far more nimble, far stronger than he was, and that begged the question:
Why hadn’t it finished him off?
Landry struggled for balance as he leapt to the next boulder, then stopped to consider.
Because it likes to play with its food?
“Hey, you ugly freak! I’m coming for you!”
There was no response, no movement from amongst the rocks.
Procyon A was getting lower in the sky, turning blood red.
Of course it’s not coming out. Why would it risk trying to kill me? I’m going to be dead in a few minutes anyway.
He looked about. It was hopeless, all right, and the alien was just one in a long list of problems.
He and Gus had gone out on an unsanctioned excursion, removing the transponder
on purpose
so that no one would know their location. Gus had even taken the extra precaution of flying low to avoid radar.
There was no help coming, he knew. This was it.
There was nowhere left to go but back to the cockpit section of the scout, where Gus lay dead, and wait it out.
Any moment that three percent on the oxygen readout was going to drop to two. Then it would drop to one.
And then?
Landry hopped down from the boulder and began to trudge across the dirt. In a few minutes he arrived back at the first crash site, where nothing had changed. Smoke was still drifting from the wreck, the systems were all silent and dark, and Gus was lying inert, his face blue and lifeless.
Landry stared at him, conflicted. Although he was distraught that Gus was dead, he was also fuming that he’d been dragged into this mess. He should never have agreed to it in the first place. It had been a bad idea from the start. He’d known that. So why had he taken the risk?
Did you even care about the consequences, Landry?
a voice in his head wanted to know.
Or were you too busy wallowing in self pity?
He clenched his fist.
“This is all your fault!” he screamed at Gus, spittle coating the inside of his visor. “Screw you, Gus!”
He turned away, hating himself for screaming at a dead man—a guy who happened to be the only one in the whole outpost who had treated him with any affection. Landry knew that he didn’t deserve any friends—not with that wall he’d built around himself—and yet Gus had tried to create a rapport between them in spite of that.
“I’m sorry,” Landry whispered hoarsely. He glanced back at his friend, ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
He reached out and steadied himself on the hull of the scout, wondering where the Argoni might have gotten to. Was it sitting out there, camouflaged as just another rock, watching as Landry’s sanity unraveled? Was it clutching at the antenna with hateful satisfaction, knowing that it had robbed him of his only chance to contact home?
What good would the antenna have done me anyway? I would still have to route the power from another system—
Landry’s heart skipped a beat as an idea struck him.
Route the power from another system.
Suddenly he was moving, clambering up into the cockpit to retrieve his toolkit.
The seconds were counting down until he ran out of air.