Authors: Jason Halstead
Elsa felt the same soreness in her back that had plagued her for the last three screamer trips. She owed that to a rough landing followed by catching the tail end of a blown up aeroskimmer. Her armor had been compromised and her spine broken, but there was virtually nothing technology couldn’t overcome. Modern medicine could fix the damage, but the pains stayed longer as she got older.
She emerged into a small clearing. A river, easily two dozen feet across, crossed her path diagonally. The trench from the capsule had disappeared several minutes ago. She stayed hidden amongst some massive roots that created a small shelter under one of the mega-oaks. She smirked, wondering at the size of the acorns they might drop in the fall. If Vitalis had a fall, she couldn’t remember reading about the seasons of the planet.
The water moved smooth and swift but didn’t seem violent. She frowned and wished her vision extended beneath it. It would be easy enough to look under the surface, but she doubted the water was crystal clear – it was running too quickly for that. Instead she looked up, hoping for some sign of air support or a sign of what it was that had knocked her off course in the first place.
Dark shapes flitted across the nighttime sky, obscuring the stars in patches. She frowned and subvocalized commands to zoom in so she might get a better look at them. A gasp escaped her lips as she realized they were birds of some sort. Her rangefinder and their relative size combined to form an icy lump in the pit of her stomach — many were larger than her screamer!
“Indigenous life forms,” she whispered, sinking back behind the tree. They were nocturnal hunters. She racked her memory for more details of the native life of Vitalis. She’d been focusing on the human need to explore Vitalis for potential medicinal and rejuvenative purposes. Her job had always involved people fighting people, exogenous life forms seldom, if ever, came into the picture. The simple fact was that humanity hadn’t run across much in the way of alien life. What had been encountered was fungus, bacteria, barely developed plant life, or a few species of very aquatic invertebrates. Vitalis had offered the first fully developed ecosystem not originating from Earth.
And the life, she now began to recall, was massive. Vitalis had been likened to a pristine Earth from millions of years ago, complete with enormous creatures not so dissimilar from Earth’s dinosaurs.
Elsa turned to stare at the winged beasts flying through the sky again. “Aw fuck,” she muttered, noticing for the first time the dark line that stretched across the sky below the birds. A quick check of her suits limited sensors confirmed that it was a cliff and it was nearly three hundred yards high. Her capsule had missed it, but that meant she was even further off course than she’d first estimated.
Chapter 3
She slipped back into the shadows beneath the roots of the tree. Environmentally contained suit of armor or not, she’d been sweating for a while and she needed a moment to rest. She decided to take the opportunity to slip off her pack and start breaking it down into smaller attachable portions. It distributed the one hundred and twenty pound load more evenly across her body and gave her a chance to take a drink from one of the water nodules it contained.
Breaking protocol and better judgment, Elsa also broke the seal on her viewport and pulled the transparent metal out of the way. The humid jungle air assaulted her, causing fresh beads of sweat to spring up on her face. In spite of the wet heat the fresh air smelled good. Not just good, it was incredible. She inhaled deeply and looked around, the helmet no longer amplifying the ambient light. Her own eyes, genetically modified to better than perfect day or night vision, paled in comparison. Even without the enhancements of technology she marveled at the raw power she felt being surrounded by nature.
Ruining an otherwise surreal moment she heard a rumbling noise that rose to a crescendo. It wasn’t nearly as distant as she’d have liked, considering it had come from the direction that her screamer pod was located. She’d never heard anything like it before, but deep in her belly she knew what it was. The sweat on her skin, once sticky and uncomfortable, now felt like ice.
Else snapped her visor down and reactivated her radio transmitter before the echoes of the monstrous roar had faded. “FIST team three, report in!” Her only answer was the rapid breathing in her own helmet.
“Get it together Gunny,” she whispered to calm herself. Without fear of her words being heard over the radio she loosened up her discipline. With the visor down there was little chance of her being heard outside her helmet. The smart armor encased her completely, providing protection from environmental, biological, and even limited nuclear threats. She wasn’t worried about physical threats either – the armor could handle just about any civilian energy weapon. Anything else, from a ballistic weapon to an ion or plasma burst, would either be too low powered to harm her or big enough to tear her apart.
She was a Marine and that meant either something couldn’t kill her or she’d be dead without a moment to suffer, why stress it? A giant animal hunting her down and tearing her apart one limb at a time, on the other hand, was something she’d never considered before.
Elsa broke from her cover and moved the remaining seven yards to the river’s edge. She tracked a stick floating in it, her suit calculating the current at roughly two feet per second. Elsa broke her rifle down in smooth practiced motions, securing the two pieces to firm points on her armor. She walked into the water, holding her breath subconsciously as the bottom fell away quickly.
Else found herself struggling against the current almost immediately. Beneath the surface it ran swifter, tugging at her and trying to send her downstream. She fought it, putting one foot after another into the rocky river bed. The armor had air enough for half an hour of moderate activity, more had she brought some of the modular oxygen tanks. Vitalis had an atmosphere that was ideal for human consumption — they’d all assumed there’d been no need for spare oxygen. Else bit back the curse muttered by deployed soldiers since the beginning of time — never enough supplies in the field.
She changed her display mode to a mixture of sonar and thermographic, mapping out the river bed and looking for potential hot spots. The water registered at a surprising eighty seven degrees Fahrenheit. Even at night it was warm enough to use as bathwater. She was trying to adjust her display to modify the thermal gradients when something bumped into her from behind.
Else jerked around, catching the blurred image of something swimming around her. She kept twisting, cursing the current for her slowness. On a hunch she counter-spun, rotating back around and catching what seemed to be a large fish coming at her. It struck, teeth scraping against her armored belly and sending her off balance. The current finished the job, knocking her off her feet and sending her rolling and floating over a dozen feet downstream before she was able to stop herself.
She looked up from her supine position and saw the carnivorous fish coming after her again. It was longer than she was tall and for the first time she wished the sensors in her helmet weren’t state of the art. She could make out teeth that would have made a Terran shark envious.
Elsa climbed to her feet, pulling out her V-Bar combat knife as she did so. Distracted by the current, the fish, and the adrenaline bursting through her veins she didn’t notice the faint humming that the powered up knife emitted. The fish came on, sensing an easy target, and tried to tear off her arm. Elsadora jerked her arm back, angling the knife towards it.
Twisting in the water she watched the fish swim downstream away from her rapidly. Had she hurt it? Her suit showed no sign of penetration but she had felt it tug at her arm on the way past. She turned again, staring into the murky depths and wishing she had more than a display based on echolocation.
Chemical sniffers in her display flashed warning lights. She called up the report on it and saw that there was blood in the water. Her knife attack had been successful. She kept the vibrating blade at the ready and continued on, hurrying to get out of the water. Another warning slipped into her display, notifying her of a breach in the arm of her suit.
“What’s next?” She muttered, lowering her arm to minimize the amount of potential air loss. The thermal imaging showed an increased warmth at the spot of the strike. Fine bubbles emerged from it to be swept downstream by the current. She redoubled her efforts to get across, looking up in time for her sonar to present a cloudy image.
She realized it was localized after a catch in her breath. Refinement a moment later showed it was a school of fish swimming upstream this time, from the direction the wounded fish had gone. Her question had been answered, a school of hungry fish following a blood trail was what was next.
They swam around her and pecked at her armor. In a matter of seconds it turned into a frustrated feeding frenzy. Her armor protected her but the fish didn’t give up. Elsa clutched her arms to her chest, covering the minor breech with her other hand, and pushed hard against the current. Her suit showed no additional breaches but a quick glance at the integrity display showed that they were somehow able to wear away at the armored surface. There were dozens if not hundreds of fish swarming her, visibility was reduced to nothing and each step was that much more difficult as she was being hammered from all sides.
The swarm of fish scattered as quickly as it had appeared. Else stumbled, driving one knee into the creek bed without the sudden persistence of the voracious fish. She looked and saw them disappearing back downstream. “I really need to shoot somebody,” Elsa complained, driving herself back to both feet. She glanced up and grinned, the surface of the river was only a few feet above her. She’d made it!
Chapter 4
She emerged from the water as fast as she could. Her arm was wet from the breech and she’d had enough of being stalked by alien piranhas. She kept moving across the loose rocks at the river’s edge towards the massive jungle that awaited her. Beyond that was her first waypoint, the cliff that she had to find a way to climb. She accepted that First Insertion Marines never had it easy, but this was ridiculous. She needed to find a spot to pop off her glove and drain her arm too.
A sound so powerful it felt like a physical blow sent Elsa into a roll across the broken ground. The speakers in her helmet cut out, preventing the overpowering decibels from ruining her ear drums. She scrambled behind some trees and jerked her rifle off her suit. Years of drilling herself and others allowed her to reassemble it by memory in a matter of seconds.
“Holy shit!” Elsa was frozen, aside from that simple phrase. On the other side of the river a massive creature was staring straight at her. It walked on two legs and was covered with feathers. Rather than looking like a bird, the beast’s legs were massive, proving they had the muscle to drive it to impressive speeds. The front limbs were smaller but no less fearsome for the talons at the end of the fingers. What scared her the most was the head. Plumes of feathers emerged from the peak and back of it, giving it a crowned appearance. The eyes regarded her with a savage fury that spoke of trespass and hunger. Beneath the eyes was another avian feature, a curved predatory beak. It opened the beak to roar at her again, dispelling thoughts of any relationship to a songbird. The open beak also displayed a single row of teeth clearly designed to rend and tear meat. In this case, her meat.
Elsa brought up the sighting reticule in her display and fired. The charged ions zapped the creature in the chest, sending a puff of feathers out and drawing a fresh roar of pain. Elsa stared, a dread chill spreading through her. It took a step forward, plunging a massive taloned foot into the river. The current didn’t seem to bother it, nor did the depth. Then again her sensors measured it at nearly eighteen feet tall.
It looked down at the river, then raised its other foot. Thinking quickly, Else shifted her gun to a new target. “Let’s see if you hungry bastards like how each other taste!” She fired twice, scoring wounds on the other leg moments before it sank into the water. “Bet you think that water feels good, don’t you?”
The Marine energy rifle was the latest example of new science improving old technology. Ionized bursts had been used for centuries in a variety of ways, but armored material had quickly been developed to thwart their effectiveness as weapons. Against unhardened targets, however, there were few weapons more instantly incapacitating. Modern warfare frowned upon weapons capable of causing civilian casualties with such ease, but with preliminary data from Vitalis showed a trend towards highly complex technology breaking down faster, the X109 has been commissioned.
The primary fire mode of the X109 was a stream of charged ions. Against normal organic targets it had a lethal range of four hundred yards, depending on the density of the atmosphere. Against something the size of Big Bird she had no idea what it would do, but the supercharged ions should have turned at least portions of it into fried chicken. It wasn’t as impressed with her weapon as she was.
Elsa fired three more times, confusing the beast but doing little more than slowing it down. It had taken three more steps, covering nearly half the width of the river, when it looked down at the water. It picked up one foot and stomped, then the other.
“Yes!” Elsa cheered, seeing it starting to circle as it tried to step on whatever was nibbling at it underwater. “Who’s the turkey now?”