Authors: Jason Halstead
“What happened?” Jeremy croaked as he tested his body and climbed, slowly, to his feet.
“I lost one of my men and I’m pressing you into service until things are resolved,” Kate snapped. She pushed the rifle in his hands. “You know how to use one of these?”
Jeremy glanced down at it, then looked back up at her. He shook his head slowly. “I won’t…I can’t. I’m not in the Navy anymore. Administratively discharged,
Ma’am
.”
“You hit your head again, Sinclair? Don’t call me Ma’am, I work for a living!” She glared at him then lowered her voice. “I don’t care what happened between you and the Navy, The pilots are dead and so are two of my Marines. We lost three civilians in the crash too. We need to be organized and the stronger we can present ourselves, the better our chances of survival! You get me, Navy?”
He looked down at the rifle in his hands again. Turning it over he checked the manual controls on it, identifying the subtle changes that had taken place since he had last held one. “It’s been a while and I only used one on the range. What are we up against?”
“No idea, just be ready to use it if you need to. What rank were you?”
“Just a spaceman,” He mumbled. Jeremy looked past her, his eyes adjusting to the light Heavy cloud cover helped. Off in the distance he saw darker, angrier looking clouds. Storm clouds, and based on the wind on his face they were coming towards them. His gaze fell to rest on the ruined hulk of the shuttle. Gaping holes in the side and back gave testimony to how rough the landing had been. He shook his head, amazed anyone had escaped it, and turned back to look at Lance Corporal Kate.
“Well Spaceman Sinclair, you keep an eye on your people and keep them in line. Something happened to our shuttle that knocked us out of the sky. No idea what it was but I know we weren’t under fire. No idea what’s out here but we have to assume the worst.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. He walked passed her over to where Dr. Rice and the others were sitting and standing. Their hushed conversation quieted as he approached. “Everyone okay?”
Synnamon stood up from where she sat on a rock and walked past him. He followed her a few paces until she spun to face him again. “Back in the military Mr. Sinclair?”
He shook his head, then realized he still held the rifle. He slung it quickly over his shoulder, then realized that her eyes had followed the movement. He’d practiced it hundreds of times but thought he’d forgotten it. Damn muscle memory. “They lost two Marines, she asked me to stand in, in case there’s trouble.”
“So what’s your story? Why is there no record of military service in your file?”
Jeremy looked away from the suspicion in her narrowed eyes. There was no record because Jeremy Sinclair had never been in the military. Jeremy Sinclair was only fifteen years old, by all accounts. “Doctor, it’s a long story and right now is not the time for it, okay? Please?”
Rice stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “I expect to be told. Everything.”
He sucked in until he couldn’t hold anymore air then let it slowly. The aches in his body and his head remained firmly in place. “Fine, Everything. Now how is everyone?”
“Scared, shaken, bruised, cut, and traumatized. Including me.”
“Yeah, I bet. You’re holding up well though. We need to keep that up.”
Jeremy turned back to the others and saw them all staring at the two of them. He opened his mouth to say something when Lance Corporal Kate’s voice cut across the group. “Grab what you can carry, we’re heading for the LZ in 10 minutes! Navy, you stick with the civilians, Potter has point, I’ll be at the rear.”
He turned to look at the Kate and shrugged. She sighed then walked past him. He stared after her and realize that the next two years were going to be the longest of his life.
A distant noise floated across the wind, causing him and several others to stare into the distance. It had sounded like something out of an movie. Outside of special effects he couldn’t imagine anything that would be loud or primal enough to make a noise like that.
Chapter 4
Jeremy grimaced time and again at the noise the ‘civilians’ made as they walked through the outskirts of the jungle. The alien trees they walked through were sparse, growing no more than twenty feet tall. Far more prevalent were the strange looking bushes with thick leaves and exotic but beautiful flowers. Dr. Bronislav warned them all away from them, stressing the unknown nature of the alien flowers and how they could easily secrete a poisonous substance for self-defense.
Twice the point Marine and Lance Corporal Kate detoured them around strange mounds that rose out of the earth. Jeremy agreed, something seemed both natural and unnatural about them. After nearly an hour of stopping and starting a raised hand from the Lance Corporal caused Jeremy to roll his eyes and halt the doctors and techs. She motioned for him, drawing a deep sigh. The breeze felt nice but it wasn’t enough to compete with the high humidity. His environmental suit was overloaded trying to keep him cool and, he could tell from the looks on the faces of the others, so were theirs.
“Stay quiet, Potter saw movement up ahead.”
“Thought there wasn’t any indigenous life here?” Jeremy had read all the reports and studied the sensor sweeps. Lots of plant and animal life, but no sign of any civilization or intelligent species.
“Animals,” Kate said. “Six legged cat-like things.”
“How many?”
Kate shrugged. “He saw one but he’s pretty sure there’s more.”
Jeremy bit back the urge to laugh. He didn’t know much about animals but he’d had enough basic classes on higher level mammals to know that cats weren’t social animals.
“This isn’t a Coalition world, Navy, we don’t know shit about these things. Now you keep those civvies quiet, we’re going to recon, stand ready.”
Jeremy nodded, biting back on the derisive snort he wanted to give her. She was a Marine, they’d just as soon shoot the animals as look at them. He made his way back to his people and shook his head to stave off the questioning looks he received.
“Settle in and stay quiet, they’ve spotted some kind of animals and want to find a way around them,” he explained.
“I should go!” Dr. Bronislav said, stepping forward.
Jeremy held his hand out, touching the man on the chest. “Doctor, they don’t want us up there and you don’t want to be up there.”
“What? Why? They’re not going—“
An inhuman screech was followed by an all too human shout. A distant crackling release of a plasma rifle followed shortly. Another shot followed quickly, then more shouts and a scream.
Jeremy swore and hoisted his rifle to his shoulder. “Fall back!” He said to them. He stepped forward, hesitating. Another scream, this one clearly a human in pain, made him bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. “All right,” he said, thinking of his daughter. “This is for you, baby.”
Jeremy rushed forward, charging through the waist-high grasses to the point where he’d met Lance Corporal Kate and then passing it. The environmental suit was nowhere near as advanced as the Marines armor was, but the display on the visor did warn him of the life forms ahead.
Two Marines, one down and the other kneeling next to the fallen one. Kate was the Marine still functional, but Jeremy could see the blood on her uniform and the side of her face and neck. Two of the animals were on the ground and another was chasing itself around in circles trying to bite at the smoldering hide on its side. Two more remained and one darted forward even as Jeremy fired, and missed, the remaining alien predator.
Lance Corporal Kate screamed again, though it didn’t sound like pain so much as frustration. Jeremy glanced at her very briefly and saw her struggling with the cat — it had her plasma rifle clamped between its jaws and even had its two forelimbs around it. He re-focused on the other cat and saw that it had turned to glare at him. Jeremy felt his overwhelmed suit hum as it tried to compensate for his elevated heart rate and perspiration, then it went still just as abruptly.
The suit went dead around him, dropping heavily against him and weighing him down. His rifle dipped with the sudden dead weight, moving it enough to make the cat leap to the side then rush towards him. Jeremy cursed and yanked the rifle up an over, then yanked the trigger in an amateur move that spat in the face of every session on the firing range he’d been forced to endure.
The grasses and dirt in front of the charging cat burst up, kicking superheated plasma, molten flecks of dirt, and burning motes of grass into its face. It stumbled to a halt and batted with its front paws at its face, then tried rubbing it on the ground. Baffled by the pain and its inability to stop it, the cat turned and fled through the grasses, disappearing before Jeremy could recover his wits and shoot it again.
“Fiona!” Jeremy gasped, struggling forward against the dead weight of the environmental suit. They were designed to allow for unpowered movement in the event of an emergency, but it felt clumsy and awkward. He overbalanced and fell forward, then scrambled to roll over and climb back to his hands and knees. When he righted himself he found the Marine fire team leader staring at him with her V-bar vibrating combat knife in hand. Not only was it held in a fighting grip but fresh red blood dripped from it.
“You okay?” She asked between breaths.
Jeremy nodded, then reached up to twist the seals on his helmet and pop it off. The hiss of escaping atmosphere was a relief rather than a scare, it had already began to grow uncomfortably warm in the overloaded suit. “Yeah, suit died on me.”
“Potter’s dead,” she continued. “Cats got him. Damn shame, he was a wizard with a plasma rifle.”
Jeremy didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t being good with a rifle a prerequisite for being a Marine? “How about you, you look bad.”
“Don’t know if I should say thanks or tell you to fuck off,” Kate said. “Hurts like hell, but I’ll live. Just scratched my face.”
Jeremy picked himself up and shambled over to her. He studied the scratches and frowned, they were a lot more than scratches. “You need stitches, those are deep. Two scraped bone.”
Her answering smile had a deformed and gruesome look to it. “Occupational hazard.”
“So now what?” Jeremy asked, knowing she wouldn’t let them help her until they were out of danger. He glanced back and Dr. Rice and the others staring at them, with Private Palenko standing watch over them.
“More occupational hazards,” she muttered.
Jeremy spun to look at her. She was staring past the cluster of line of trees and bushes the cats had been hiding in. He followed her gaze and saw what had her attention, a small herd of giant four legged creatures that made elephants look like children’s toys.
“What the fuck are those?” He blurted out.
“Dinosaurs.”
Chapter 5
“Mr. Sinclair, I trust next time you’ll remember your purpose here when an opportunity such as that arises!“
“Piotr, enough!” Dr. Rice had a glare matching her words. Jeremy was glad she seemed to be on his side. “We lost one of our people back there to the smaller species, we don’t know how the large ones would have reacted to our presence.”
“Bah! They were herbivorous! You saw them, they were no threat!”
“They were five, six times as tall as we are and probably outweighed us by a factor of one hundred. Whether they wanted to eat us or not, causing them to stampede would have ended our mission.”
Jeremy found himself nodding. He’d been more in line with Lance Corporal Kate at the time that any native was a potential enemy. Now that he’d had time to think about it, he found himself agreeing more with Dr. Rice and Dr. Bronislav. Jeremy was a technician. Being a scientist had never been what he’d wanted out of life, but he was good at it and it was interesting. What had once been a cover story had become the real him.
He stretched and looked around. They were resting and eating a hastily put together meal of protein powders and flavored water, all of it from the ship. The scans continued to read positive for the planet being safe for human consumption, but so far they’d only tested the air. All of them, in fact, had their helmets off.
Jeremy continued to slug around in his unpowered suit – stripping out of it meant being naked. A tech that was slated to be the science post’s systems specialist, Anita Cuseros, had already checked out the power supply and pointed out that he’d overloaded it to the point where the breaker had blown on it and the unit had still managed to fuse itself into a melted mass of scrap.
He wasn’t the only one, one of the Marines that had landed safely had a suit that had lost power too. Freak occurrence, they’d said. His entire power pack had blown, but at least the suit was designed so that the explosion had been directed away from his body. Now the Marine was struggling to do anything – the military suits were far heavier than the civilian versions.
The good news was that the other two transports had landed without incident. Technicians, some from the ship and some contracted to stay with the science colony, scrambled to unload and erect the equipment. The first was a defensive perimeter consisting of energized walls matched with ultrasonic generators. The high frequency sound waves had been tested to drive animals away and inflict debilitating nausea on humans and the three other species of primates that survived the industrialization of Earth.