Lost Planet 01 - The Lost Planet (20 page)

With a mechanical clang, the shuttle jerked to a sudden stop midair, sending everyone lunging forward. Mina slammed into the back of the seat, and Maurus cracked his head against the console with a curse. Chase's head swam from the motion, the heat, and the low oxygen levels. His stomach felt as if it were trying to climb out of his throat.

“Everyone okay?” gasped Maurus. “We should land in water in less than a minute … I hope.” Through the portholes, all Chase could see was a swirling, creamy-colored haze. He slipped in and out of consciousness, but when the haze finally cleared, what he saw below was not blue water, but something sluggish and brick colored. He cringed and braced for impact.

They hit with a hard jolt, but rather than crumpling, the shuttle plunged and then drifted slowly back up. Chase squinted out the window. “Nah water?” he slurred.

“Close enough,” said Maurus, forcing out each word with difficulty. “Mina, open the hatch.”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” said Mina calmly. “The pressure change is too great, it will hurt you. Can you open a vent?”

“Not much … pressure,” protested Maurus, but he lolled his head forward and made some changes on the console. There was a hiss, and moist, earthy-smelling air began to seep in, pressing from all sides like a leaden blanket.

They were alive, at least for a little bit longer. Too nauseated to feel anything close to relief, Chase leaned forward and threw up on the floor.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Chase sat back in his seat and waited for his dizziness to subside as the external air slowly filled the shuttle. The planet had a thick, sticky atmosphere, and his forcing the moist air into his lungs felt like breathing syrup.

Maurus looked over at him, his face flushed and his eyes bulging slightly. Chase wondered if his own eyes looked that way. It certainly felt like it.

“Let's get out of here,” Maurus wheezed. “Mina, open the door.”

Mina unlocked the ceiling hatch and pushed it open. Maurus struggled to his feet to join her. Chase looked skyward as a blast of hot, humid air swirled through the cabin, blowing his hair across his forehead. He didn't have the energy to stand. He could hear them talking, but their words were swept away by the wind.

Mina hoisted herself out onto the roof, and Maurus sat back down in the shuttle, heaving a deep breath. Chase rolled his head over to look at him. “And?”

Maurus attempted a wry smile. “Could be better. We're in the middle of some kind of mud sea. Might be this world's version of an ocean. Can't tell how far it goes, but it looks like a pretty thick soup out there.”

Chase peeled himself off the seat and twisted around to look at Parker's still, pale form on the floor. He stared at Parker's chest until he could see its shallow rise and fall. “Aren't there any people living here?”

“Guidance systems indicated there were no colonies on the planet.” Maurus leaned toward the controls. “We'll have to hope someone picks up our distress beacon.”

Chase turned back around and looked at the flickering console screen. “Where are we?”

“This is a Zeta-grade planet. That means it can support organic life, but has no native civilization. Some Zeta planets are colonized, like Qesaris, or…” He hesitated, and said, “Or Trucon. But ninety-nine percent of the time they're deemed unfit for settlement—this one probably because of the thick atmosphere.”

“Why was Trucon colonized if it was full of those monsters?” Chase asked. It seemed like years since the scaly creatures had attacked him outside Parker's house.

Maurus paused for a moment to catch his breath. “The Zinnjerha? They were a threat, but I suppose the planet was very appealing for colonization because of its proximity to three other hospitable Zeta planets.” A dark look crossed his face.

“What is it?”

“I should have known,” Maurus muttered.

“Known what?”

“The mission my captain had sent me to investigate was a report of nighttime trafficking movement in the Truconian desert—Lyolians, of course, which is why it had to be me. But when I got there, none of it was true. The story wasn't even feasible. I wasted all my time trying to figure out how my captain got his information wrong, when he was the one who knowingly sent me on a fool's errand. I should have known something was wrong.”

The bitterness and regret in Maurus's voice evaporated any doubt Chase might have had that he wasn't behind the Trucon attack. He was telling the truth—he'd been set up. “It's not like you could have known what was going to happen,” Chase said.

Maurus shook his head. “No, but I should have questioned every possibility. You can respect authority without mindlessly trusting it.”

Mina's face appeared in the open hatch overhead. “The shuttle is beginning to sink,” she said.

A spike of adrenaline shot through Chase's stomach. “What?”

She climbed into the back. “It's gone down three centimeters in the last minute.”

Maurus cursed. “We must have split a seam when we hit the ocean.” He clambered out onto the roof. Chase struggled to follow him, but it seemed as if his body weighed twice as much as usual—just raising his hand felt like pushing his arm through water.

Taking a looped length of black cable from a storage compartment, Mina hopped out onto the roof of the shuttle. Chase hauled himself after her through the open hatch and looked outside at the strange world they had landed on.

All around them, for as far as he could see, was a wide expanse of flat, brick-colored ocean, rippling in a strong wind. The air was hot, moist, and earthy, and swirling clouds of pink- and cream-colored gases filled the sky. Mina tied one end of the cable around her waist and handed the other end to Maurus. Before Chase could ask what she was doing, she jumped off the sinking shuttle and without even a splash disappeared into the thick, murky liquid.

Chase looked at Maurus for an explanation, but he only studied the spot where Mina had gone under. A moment later, her head popped back up, glazed in viscous red mud. She wiped her face. “It's very sticky, but I think I can swim in it.” She began a lap around the vehicle.

“What's she doing?” Chase asked Maurus.

“She thinks she sees some trees, or land, far in the distance. She's going to try pulling the shuttle there.”

Chase squinted. “I don't see anything.”

“It's too hazy to see very far. She's the android; I'm taking her word for it.”

“Are we going to sink?” Chase asked. “What if no one hears our distress call? How are we going to get off this planet?”

Maurus's mouth twisted, and he squeezed Chase's shoulder. “Come on. We've made it this far, haven't we?”

“Throw me the rest of the cable.” Mina had completed her lap, and the head that poked above the surface was barely recognizable. She tied the free end of the cable to the shuttle and began paddling out in front, trying to pull the shuttle, but with no landmarks, it seemed like they weren't moving at all.

“This is useless,” Chase said. “She's not going anywhere.”

“Look behind you.” A shallow wake, barely indented in the swampy surface, showed that they were making some kind of progress. “I'd imagine she'd burn her limbs out and wear them down to stumps if that's what it took to save Parker. Not that she will—I've seen androids similar to her take a lot tougher beating than this.”

Chase still couldn't see anything in their hazy environment other than swirling hot gas, but he hoped Mina's senses were better than his.

Maurus gazed ahead, and then he gave his head a shake, as if to clear it. “I feel like I'm getting the hang of breathing this stuff, how about you?”

“I feel like I'm underwater,” Chase admitted.

Maurus laughed. When he looked over, a stab of fear went through Chase. Maurus's face was crinkled up in a friendly grin, but a spot of bright red had bloomed in the white of his left eye. Chase felt the urge to touch his own eyes, wondering if the same thing was happening to him. He looked away, glancing down into the cabin, and shouted in alarm.

Below them, Parker lay in a shallow puddle of glossy mud that had formed on the floor of the shuttle. Maurus leapt down into the cabin and hoisted Parker's limp body so Chase could pull him out onto the roof.

“Mina!” Maurus yelled, pulling himself out and crawling down to the nose of the shuttle. “It's filling up inside, it's going to sink soon!” Mina didn't break pace, paddling resolutely onward toward a destination that only she could sense. Chase huddled beside Parker on the roof of the shuttle, wiping the mud from his face. Parker's eyes stayed closed, and his breathing sounded ragged, as though he were choking on something.

“Parker, can you hear me?” Chase said in his ear. “Just hang on, we're going to get you help.” He was a liar. They weren't getting off this planet, and the only thing that awaited them was a horrific death by drowning in a sea of mud.

The shuttle was definitely sinking, and as the nose began to dip below the surface, Maurus scooted back toward the open hatch.

Chase squinted into the distance and blinked a few times to make sure he wasn't imagining things. “Hey, I think I see something!”

Rising from the maroon swampland was the hazy outline of an immense structure on the horizon. As they drew closer, he saw that it was organic, an interwoven network of stalks that sprouted densely from the water to form a towering pale jungle that stretched on for miles.

The shuttle slipped deeper beneath the surface, and Chase pulled Parker higher onto the tail section. Eventually Mina could pull it no farther, and she untied the cable from her waist and fought her way back to the tail section.

“Alright, we're going to have to swim from here. It's not as far as it looks. Loop Parker's arms around my neck and I'll pull him there.”

“Can you swim?” Maurus asked Chase.

“I think I can,” said Chase. Together, he and Maurus slid off the side of the shuttle and into the cold ooze. If he had found it difficult to move in the planet's air, the sea was a thousand times worse. He thrashed as hard as he could, until his entire body tingled, but he barely seemed to move forward in the sludge at all. He stopped to catch his breath, and immediately the sea began to suck him down.

“Hey!” shouted Maurus, bobbing in the distance. “Make it over here! You can make it to me!” Chase struggled through the mud, fixed on his goal, and was hyperventilating nearly to the point of blacking out by the time he reached Maurus's side.

“I can't do this,” he croaked, clutching at Maurus's shoulder.

“It's okay, we'll do it together,” said Maurus. “Put your arm around my neck, and I'll help you stay above the surface. See?” They kicked at the mud side by side, Maurus pulling Chase up every time he began to sink. Their progress was minuscule. Maurus heaved for air, and Chase knew he was slowing him down.

Mina and Parker vanished in the distance. Maurus made Chase pause a couple of times so they could catch their breath, and when Chase looked over his shoulder, he was dismayed to see how close they still were to the foundering shuttle. He began to wonder how much longer they would last before they gave up and surrendered to the swampy depths, when Mina's face emerged from the haze ahead.

“Hold on, I can take him,” she called, and she paddled up close so Chase could grab on to her firm shoulders. “I'll be back for you,” she said to Maurus.

“I'll make it,” he panted.

“I'll come back,” she repeated, and took off toward the pale jungle. Chase appreciated the boundless strength in her android limbs as she moved them steadily forward, her legs churning effortlessly through the thick mud. The outcropping ahead drew closer. The stalks were actually some type of gnarled, leafless trunks that all grew together into one another. It was impossible to tell if they were individual plants, or one endless, knotty growth.

When they reached one of the trunks, Mina ordered Chase to hang on tight as she climbed up the intersecting branches. He clung to her neck, dripping sticky tendrils of mud. She took him up to a wide intersection of twisted branches, where she had left Parker tucked snugly in the fork of two large boughs.

“Keep an eye on him. I'm going back for Maurus.”

Chase touched one of Parker's arms to let him know he was there and hunched on a branch beside him, shaking with exhaustion. Parker's skin was waxy pale and he looked like he was already dead, but his body was still scorching hot. Ahead of them lay only swirling haze—the shuttle was too far away to see and had probably sunk by now. Behind them stretched a never-ending forest of pale branches.

Hot winds dried the mud coating Chase, causing it to shrink and pull on the tiny hairs on his arms. Finally Mina appeared below with Maurus clinging to her shoulders. As Chase watched them scale the trees, Parker suddenly thrashed, hitting him on the cheek. He tried to hold Parker's arm down, but Parker began to shake uncontrollably. His eyes rolled back in his head, and yellow foam ran from his mouth and mingled with the mud on his chin.

“Mina!” Chase screamed. “Come quick!”

A second later she was leaning over Parker. “He's having a seizure. We have to turn him on his side so he doesn't choke.”

Maurus clambered up beside them and shook his head, his face twisted with grief. “We're too late. The poison is starting to overload his brain.”

“Do something!” Chase looked frantically back and forth at Maurus and Mina. “There's got to be something we can do!”

Lying on his side, Parker coughed, spraying thick yellow foam on the branch beside him. A sharp, acrid smell hit Chase's nose, overpowering the fetid stench of the mud sea.

“Don't let any of that touch you,” warned Maurus.

The tree gave a tremendous shudder, and with a sharp crack, one of the branches supporting them broke loose.