Colonists - Leader, part 6

BREVITY SCIENCES BUILDING

July 1, 2186

Private Rogers busted into the front door loudly, “Holy shit, Landers! We found one!”

Rogers, who had become a good friend of Landers over the last year, ran to her with a print-out of a picture. She looked at him with a bit of wide-eyed mock-terror, unsure what he was so animated about, “Cool your jets, soldier. What did you find?”

“A worm! Or a carcass of one - it’s above ground and looks dead. Grayhawk found it while doing a run out to the drill site. I was riding onboard and spotted it out a ways in a clearing. Grayhawk flew us in low to peak at it,” he explained handing the picture to her.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed as she looked at the image, “It’s in great condition! No open wounds, the body looks almost fully intact.” She reached out a hand to pat him on the shoulder, “Go get the Major - have him prep one of his dropships. I’ll go Advisor Oum to see if she’ll clear us an expedition out to it.”

Advisor Oum looked at the image with Brittany Landers standing over her shoulder, “It is in good condition, Ms. Landers. You want to go out there, else you wouldn’t even be here.”

“Yes ma’am,” Landers stated not trying to cover her excitement.

There was a part of Oum that didn’t want her to go but she couldn’t think of a legit reason not to other than perhaps an excessive expenditure of resources. Even that was a weak argument as a nascent but strong farming ecology had been started around Brevity colony. They had food stores to keep the colony well fed, even if they didn’t have emergency rations left over from the ship Brevity.

But the worms were a scientific curiosity and maybe something could be learned about the animals - anything - that might better prepare the colony of Brevity in case one ever got too close to go on a rampage.

Not that they had much to worry about on that front. Since the first sighting of the first worm after their initial landing, only one other worm had been seen and a few scant seismic readings from their survey pods. And even those couldn’t be verified as being worms; assumptions were just being made.

“Alright, Ms. Landers. If the Major clears it and a pilot doesn’t mind, then you can take a small team out there. How far away is this carcass?”

“About four miles. Just a tad east of the mining site,” Landers explained as she was half out the door.

Oum waved her on, “Very well. I want 12-hour updates sent to the listening tower and forwarded to my office.”

“Yes, Advisor! Thank you!” the woman shouted back as her figure disappeared outside.

DROPSHIP TWO

July 1, 2186

“Grayhawk” was the callsign for Flight Lieutenant Justin Bauder. He was just a year younger than Pharaoh and had been the one to take the high-altitude pictures of the carcass as he was returning from a delivery run with Private Rogers out to the iron and gold mining site.

The military combat transport-turned-cargo hauler and civilian shuttle landed thirty meters from the worm carcass. The light brown-gray skin was mottled with deep wrinkles, calluses, and comparatively tiny mandibles across its body - each of which were about the length of a man’s arm. Those mandibles now hung limply at its sides.

“Jesus, this thing reeks,” Private Ortega said as he stepped out of the side of the dropship. Landers was right behind him but didn’t add any additional commentary. Privates Ortega, Rogers, and Brown had come out as research site security along with one Corporal Shana Graack whom Landers hadn’t met before today.

Landers turned to help the rest of her research team pull the equipment free of the dropship: tents, remote survey gear, a miniature sized DNA analysis table, electronic microscopes, power freezers for organ storage, and appropriate food stuffs. The unloading process was fairly quick and Grayhawk dismounted from the cockpit of Dropship Two.

Landers approached the carcass - it was easily out of the ground by twenty-five or thirty meters. “Look at the condition it’s in,” she mused aloud.

Rogers nodded at her, “Told you it was in good shape.”

“You were certainly right,” she replied as they closed on the body. She snapped on a pair of gloves and reached a hand out to touch one of the mandibles. Along the arm-length protrusion was hundreds or thousands of little fuzzy feelers. One of Landers’ associates came up to inspect the mandible with her, Rogers stepped back a bit to give them room.

As the two scientists were drooling over the dead body, Rogers looked up to take in how tall the worm was even on its side. The monster was easily three or four times the thickness of human’s height. And every couple of feet was another fuzzy mandible.

“Hoooooly hell at the claws on this thing,” Ortega shouted.

“Don’t dick around, private,” the corporal shouted at him. This caught Rogers’ attention and he started marching to the front of the worm.

“Seriously! This scares me to death,” Ortega continued.

Rogers made it around one of the splayed-out jaws on the worm’s front. Stretching out from its mouth was one of the massive tentacles he had seen scooping up the cows like nothing a year and half ago. The long tentacle actually had a trio of razor-sharp bone-white claws. Each claw was easily a foot longer than a man was thick.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Rogers added.

Graack looked at him, “Yea you were with Landers when you saw the first one, right?”

“Sure was. These claws were popping cows into its mouth like popcorn on show night. The fifty did next to nothing against its thick hide,” he confirmed, referring to the .50-caliber automatic weapon mounted on their LAVs.

“Hey Ortega, get a picture,” Brown said as he stepped up close to the claw and hoisted it over his shoulder with some serious effort, despite the PAF.

“Private!” Graack barked, “Stop. This thing might have some nervous reaction you’ll trigger and pull you inside and we wouldn’t be able to do shit about it.”

“Oh I think this one is well and good expired,” Landers said coming up behind the Infantry. She hooked an arm inside Rogers’ crooked elbow and guided him over to Brown. “Go ahead, Ortega - take your picture.”

Brown smiled as he took off his helmet, “See Corporal? The doc says it’s perfectly safe.”

Graack rolled her eyes and threw up her non-rifle-holding hand in surrender, “When you all end up worm food I’m filing the report under ‘mass suicide.’”

About that time Grayhawk walked up, having removed his helmet and added to the conversation, “Get everyone in. I’ll setup my mission recorder to photo us all.”

The term “photo” wasn’t really true anymore as a photosensitive sensor wasn’t the only thing capturing imaging data. A more complex capture device was required than the 21st century digital cameras and phones. The Flight Lieutenant setup a portable directional holo-imager. After setting a 5-second timer and gathering the scientific team of a half-dozen together the group posed for the picture - Brown with the clawed tentacle over his shoulder, Landers hooked into Rogers’ arm, and one of the scientists holding another clawed tentacle seductively while making a kissy face at the hideous thing.

NILE SYSTEM

July 1, 2186

Edge of Nile solar system

It emerged from hyperspace quieter than a mouse in an empty cathedral. The fact that anyone might have seen the hyperspace signature was highly unlikely unless they were looking right at the egress point. Which was possible, yet was irrelevant.

Once an analysis of the system was complete the cold calculating brain’s logic plotted a parabolic course that would intercept it with the second planet in the system. This was the sole habitable world for humans. The predictable and stable orbit around the star made it easy to perfectly predict a flight plan to come into the atmosphere.

As it closed on the distance to the planet, knowing the journey would take several days, it began scanning the rest of the system for any other signs of human habitation - space stations, ships, orbital relays - anything at all that may have indicated how far out from the second planet the humans had reached.

BREVITY LISTENING TOWER

July 4, 2186

Specialist Hope Irizarri sat at her station listening to the radio chatter of the mining team out digging up the iron and gold from Nile’s ground. She didn’t have much else to occupy her attention given that there was no HyperCOM out here at the ass-end of human space.

Can this even be called human space? We have no fleet, no communications; this place isn’t much more than a spit of defiance in the face of the Kamikaze. Her thoughts were somewhat more dismal than those of her compatriots. But it's a job. Better than whoring like my old friends back on Earth.

One of the civilian operators had a crush on her and flirted with her constantly. Sometimes she appreciated the attention, but some days it was just too much. Today was one of the days it was starting to wear on her as hour six of watching orbital scan reports scrolled by with nothing more than recording a thunderstorm in Nile’s northern hemisphere several hundred kilometers east.

The spunky civvie was saying something else to her just as an alert on her screen went off. Orbital Four had identified a high-speed ballistic object entering the outer atmosphere of Nile. At first Hope had thought it was just another tiny asteroid that was entering the thick atmosphere. She re-checked its entry vector however and saw that it had made a course correction.

Hope double-checked its inbound trajectory and cross-referenced the other orbitals. Orbital Three had caught it coming in for planet-fall and had actually captured its first course correction as it moved around Nile’s moon. O-Three didn’t have a visual before it started lighting up from entering the atmosphere, however. She immediately called up Major Decatur.

Decatur would’ve killed to have something to do beside decide how he was going to distribute training schedules for his troops. Endless, mind-numbing patrols and civilian interaction exercises were wearing him down. And his Infantry. They were killers - trained to hunt down the enemy and blow them into stardust. Not decide for whom and for what their modular heavy vehicles were to be used.

Farming or earth-moving today? Decatur groaned equally at the thought and his personal radio as it beeped for his attention.

“Decatur, go ahead,” he called.

“Major, Listening Tower - we’ve got one unknown bogey entering atmosphere. It’s hot and confirmed on course corrections; it’s not a natural object - definitely under power,” Irizarri spoke.

Decatur’s blood ran cold. This was classic Kamikaze tactics: send in one ballistic and suicidal starfighter first to see if the human colony on a world could be exterminated. If not, then greater forces would arrive to finish the job. Usually in the form of a cruiser with orbit-to-ground weapons.

“Set all hands under alert condition one, sound the air raid and get the Advisor up to the Listening Tower,” he called into his radio as he was already making for the door out of his office.

He switched over to the pilot-scramble frequency, “Pharaoh and Nutsbe, mount weapons racks and scramble your birds. Tower is tracking an unknown hostile coming in atmosphere under power and at speed. How copy?”

“Loudly. Gearing up,” Pharaoh replied.

“Gearing up, Actual,” the second pilot - Marshall "Nutsbe" Chaffin - replied right after.

Graack - along with the rest of the Infantrymen that had escorted the scientists out to the worm carcass - had given up on wearing her Frame. It was too hot and far too boring to be in their gear constantly. Besides there wasn’t any aggressive animals except the tri-jaws when they got into heat. The Infantrymen did, however, still keep their rifles slung over their shoulders.

Graack became distantly aware of a distant rumble. It started to increase in volume steadily but rapidly. She realized it was coming from Brevity. Turning to look in that direction she could barely make out the distant figures of two dropships hauling serious ass almost directly to them.

She turned to shout for her dropship’s pilot, “Grayhawk! Two of our birds are coming in, hella-fast!”

The younger man ran past her toward his ship. As he clambered up the steps into the cockpit Graack was right behind him. Making contact with the seat, the pair of other dropships blew past them easily approaching the speed of sound for Nile’s atmosphere. Despite the incredibly high speed they moved Graack was able to recognize the under-wing weapons mounts had been racked.

“Dropship Two to Dropship One - what’s going on, boss? Over,” Bauder called into his headset. He flipped on the cockpit audio for Graack.

“Hot unknown entering the atmosphere under power, Two. Clear the channel and standby for combat orders. Over and out,” Pharoah stated in a clipped professional voice.

Graack bounded back down the steps into the troop bay and out the side hatch. She called out to her team, “Infantry! Get your asses in your Frames! Possible imminent hostile contact entering the atmosphere!” The other three Infantrymen began moving to their collapsed Frames to activate them.

Landers ran up just as Graack was getting her own Frame online and primed, “What’s going on? Hostile contacts, you said? Kamikaze?”

“Don’t know what kind of hostile contact, just that our two dropships at Brevity were loaded for combat,” Graack replied.

“Are we evacuating or staying here?”

Graack shrugged, such that she could in the PAF, “I haven’t received orders to evac you yet but that’s a likely possibility.”

Decatur listened to the radio chatter and kept an eye on the LIDAR screens that were tracking his two dropships and the unknown contact. He kept one ear of the headphones on. Advisor Oum was to his left, ever shadowed by Ilarion Chuvnik, and doing the same.

“I’ve got good track on it,” Pharaoh called into the comm.

“Same. It should be breaking through that cloud cover any second,” Nutsbe replied.

Half a minute of silence passed. It was one of those moments where whatever happened next was fully in the hands of his pilots - all Decatur could do was pray and hope for the best.

“Visual! Boy that bastard is coming in hot. Too hot,” Pharaoh commented.

“Pharaoh, Actual. What’s happening?” Decatur called.

“The contact isn’t braking at all, it’s almost completely a fireball; lots of smoke, can’t make it out clearly…” her voice strained at the end.

“I’ve got solid lock on air-to-air,” Pharaoh’s dropship copilot called.

“Confirming lock as well,” Nutsbe’s copilot added.

“Hold fire - she’s tumbling. Repeat: contact is out of control, it’s spinning end over end,” Pharaoh said. “It’s leveling out now and altering course… slowing down.”

Advisor Oum looked at Decatur, "Out of control and now slowing down?  That's not Kamikaze tactics, is it?"

"Not that I've ever heard of," he confirmed. It was more typical for the leading suicide fighter to stay high-speed to quickly eliminate human aircraft. It was additionally curious that the unknown contact hadn't made any form of action to intercept the dropships.

“Actual, Nutsbe. We have solid lock on enemy contact, it looks like the smoke is clearing,” the second dropship pilot said.

“Actual, I think… I think this is a human ship. We sure this isn’t one of our orbitals that lost control of itself?” Pharaoh asked over the radio.

Decatur looked at Specialist Irizarri for an answer, “Negative, sir. All orbitals are still in atmosphere and providing good tracking. And O-Three caught it coming around the dark side of the moon.”

Decatur nodded, “Pharoah, Actual. Confirmed not one of our orbitals; they’re all still operational.”

“Copy that, Actual. Update on course, this thing looks like it’s going to crash into the sea,” Pharaoh replied.

“Damn. We don’t have any water vessels. How will we save it?” Decatur mused aloud, not really meaning it to be answered right away.

The Advisor obliged him anyway, “We need to track it all the way in, Major. If we have a good lock on its crash site we might be able to build vessels to get out to it later.”

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Decatur said, then reactivated his mic to his pilots, “Dropship flight, Actual. New mission: follow the object all the way to its splashdown. Don’t let it out of your sight, we need good track for future recovery.”

“Copy, Actual. Moving to full-monitor mission,” Pharaoh replied.

“Dropship Three copies on monitoring,” Nutsbe also confirmed.

Pharaoh watched the object finally make its violent splash into the nearest ocean. She brought her dropship in low and slow to get a good view of it. Her co-pilot, the former captain of the Brevity, Aegeus, was craning his neck as well to see what remained after the big splash and resulting steam from the hot object cleared.

To her amazement the… probe or whatever it was, actually had deployed a payload of crash-bags that looked to double as floaters. The big orange spheres bobbed and buoyed as a convenient cradle for a large silver/gray cylinder. It was textured and clearly of a human design.

“Actual, Pharaoh. We have solid lock on the object. Looks like some kind of probe sent from Earth. It’s definitely man-made, no questions about it,” she stated.

“Pharaoh, Actual. Sounds great. You have a visual?”

“Five-by-five, Actual. She’s deployed crash bags and is floating on the surface. I might be able to hook her with a cargo claw if we can get one fitted on my bird,” she said over the radio.

“Solid copy, Pharaoh. Have Nutsbe stay near the object so we can track it and get you back out there ASAP,” Decatur said.

Just as Pharaoh was about to acknowledge his orders something caught her eye in the water. It was a series of pale blue lights - six in a roughly hexagonal pattern - that were rising up beneath the probe. “Nutsbe pull up!” she called into the comm. As her dropship gained in altitude a large “mouth” splashed up out of the water.

She wasn’t sure what the hell to call it, but the thing coming out of the water had a roughly turtle-like look to it. The thing came up just enough that the lights that she assumed were its eyes didn’t quite break the water’s surface. It closed its mouth around the probe before again submerging beneath the inky deep blue waves.

“Uuuuhhh… Actual, we’ve got a problem…” Pharaoh said into her mic.