Vitalis Omnibus (13 page)

The water slowly returned to the ocean or remained trapped in puddles and ponds. Small waves lapped at the
shore, followed by another unnatural stillness. Cleared of any indigenous life forms, the machine that broke through the surface of the water several minutes later was greeted by nothing but silence. Water crested around it until it began to climb out of the water and onto the beach on wheels covered in metal treads. With less than a dozen feet to go the treads bogged down in the soft sand and jammed up.

After a few minutes of attempting to rock the vehicle back and forth to free it, the wheels proved too jammed with sand and mud to move. A hatch opened on the side, hissing as internal and external pressures equalized. Tarn stepped out, plasma rifle in hand and a bandage across his head and leg. He climbed across the hull of the tracked mining vehicle and lowered himself carefully into the water. It was waist high on him, allowing him to wade forward slowly, his rifle held at the ready.

Captain Sharp followed, bandages around his midsection and bloodstains covering much of his clothing. Kira and Jeff came next, supporting Eric between them. The extensive bandages on the engineer gave proof to where much of the blood on Sharp’s clothing had come from.

They waded ashore, on their own or with the support of others, and all but collapsed on the beach. Eric glanced over, gasping for breath as he did so. Kira followed his gaze, tears running down her cheeks as she did so. A large serpentine fish flopped in a shallow puddle of water. As it gasped and extend
ed its mouth, they saw the sharp row of teeth lining its jaw.

“Tropical paradise,” Eric wheezed.

Kira tried, and failed, to bite back a sob.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

She shook her head and fought back the tightness in her throat. “No, it’s all right. Just try to rest. We’ll get you in the shade.”

“What shade?” Tarn called out from ahead. “Wave took out most of the trees and them that’s left got no leaves on
’em.”

“Then we’ve got building materials,” Kira snapped at him. She looked around and gestured with the arm not holding on to Eric. “Gather up the broken
twigs and limbs and we can make a lean-to.”

Tarn stared at her, open
-mouthed. He turned to Sharp, ready to sputter a protest when the Captain nodded. “Do it. There’s nothing around us for a ways; let’s make shelter and rest up. Grab some of those fish and we can have a real dinner, too.”

“Can we eat them?”
Jeff asked, staring at the sharp teeth in the mouth of the nearby fish.

“If we can’t eat what’s here, we won’t last long. Might as well find out sooner rather than later.”

Kira grunted, signaling to Jeff and they moved forward up the beach until they neared the first of the uprooted and broken trees that had been at the edge of the jungle. They gently lowered Eric to the ground. “Go help with the shelter,” Kira bade Eric’s assistant. He nodded and hurried off, limping at his own twisted knee.

None of them had escaped the crash unscathed. Kira had a nasty scrape across her back that had torn her shirt and skin, but it was minor in comparison to the slivers of metal that had speared through Eric’s side when the inertial suppressor overloaded and exploded in front of him. His leg had been broken by a large piece of metal paneling and his head gashed when he’d crashed to the floor.

Kira pulled back his bandages at his side and stared at the torn flesh. The edges were raw and pink. She shook her head, terrified at what the lack of real medical attention would mean. A new world with new strains of bacteria and an open wound — Eric’s time was limited, at best.

“How is it?”
he asked her.

“The bleeding has stopped,” she said. That was the only positive thing she could think to say. The water from the ocean had cleaned it some. “
Rest will determine what happens next. The metal pieces were through and through, at least, and so hot from the explosion they were self-cauterizing.”

“Lucky me,” Eric groaned.

Kira faked a smile to keep herself from crying. After all she’d been through, discovering both herself and Eric, it wasn’t fair that she should lose him now. Of all the people that had to be hurt, why couldn’t it have been Tarn or Jeff or the Captain? She glanced away, suddenly ashamed at herself for thinking that way. The Captain and Jeff didn’t deserve to be hurt any more than Eric did. Tarn — well…

Jeff supervised the construction of the shelter, which quickly came to resemble a simple but spacious lean-to. Using the laser rifles
, they started a fire and cooked up the fish. They found a few drowned or crushed animals amongst the fallen timbers as well, creatures that went unidentified. They left them alone, content to dine on the fish instead.

The meal was simple but satisfying. They had no water to wash it down with, a problem that they only now realized. The ocean was far too salty to drink, another reminder of the human home world hundreds of light years away.

The sun fell quickly, proving they’d crashed in the afternoon. With the setting sun came a sudden and surprising downpour from above. “All that water we kicked up when we crashed,” Tarn muttered. “Temperature dropped.”

“Gather it up!” Kira snapped. “Use whatever we’ve got!”

They looked around, scrambling to find anything they could to capture the rainwater. A loud crash from the darkness drew them up short. “What was that?” Jeff asked.

His answer came in the form of a loud roar that made their ears ring. They scrambled again, this time grabbing weapons and raising them to point into the waterlogged darkness. “Put the fire out!” Sharp hissed.

“No! Leave it. Tarn, stay here; I’ll flank it,” Kira rose up, grimacing at the stiffness that had set into her back. Without waiting for a response she slipped into the night, picking her way as best she could over the fallen timbers and spongy ground. She grunted in surprise when she stepped in a puddle that was deeper than she expected. Adding a fresh twist of her ankle and wrench in her hip, Kira struggled up to her knee and raised her scope to peer into the darkness. She flipped the imaging mode on it to thermal and saw a massive shape approaching.

A crackle followed immediately behind a burst of light that streaked across the rainy landscape. Unlike laser and ion rifles, a plasma rifle fired a burst of energized matter that was visible to the human eye.  It let off a bright light, displaying for a fraction of a second the two
-legged beast that stood close to twenty feet tall.

Additional bursts of plasma followed, lighting up
the darkness as both the Captain and Tarn opened up on the beast. Most of their blasts flew wide in the darkness but a few hit home, causing additional roars of rage but little in the way of actual damage. It spurred the creature on, bringing it towards them, closer and closer. The only thing saving them was the unfamiliar ground beneath the beast as it tripped and stumbled over the ruined landscape.

Kira noted the range in her scope and fired when it was only a hundred yard
s away. Assuming the monster had the same general physiology as every other mammal, she had aimed for its head. She had a quartering towards her shot, so she put the crosshair just behind the beast’s right eye.

The first shot rocked the beast
’s head to the left. It had stepped in a depression as she had fired, lowering it just enough that the .276 caliber teardrop glanced off the creature’s forehead. It staggered from the impact, sidestepping several times to keep its feet, and then shook its gargantuan head and roared anew. More plasma bursts speared towards it, catching patches of its hide on fire. Kira stared calmly through her scope, noting additional heat spikes showing up as someone fired a laser rifle at the beast as well. Whatever the hide consisted of, it seemed highly resistant to energy weapons.

Her rifle throbbed against her palm, letting her know the coils were ready. She stroked the trigger, making the contact that generated the magnetic pulse along the rails. This time the round struck where she intended it, at a direct angle on the side of its head. It crashed to the ground, falling on its side and jerking its powerful legs several times before lying still.

Kira rose up, stumbling as she did so. Fresh pain lanced through the leg she’d wrenched. Gritting her teeth, she limped over to the fallen monster and stared at it in the darkness. The fires on its hide had been put out by the rain but she could see well enough in the darkness to see it was covered with a thick layer of short feathers. Tarn and Sharp joined her a moment later, swearing as they drew close enough to see it.

“Where the hell are we?” Tarn asked.

“I wonder if it tastes like chicken?” Sharp offered.

Kira turned away from it. “Doesn’t matter
. It came hunting and we got in its way. We need to find a safe place as soon as we can and hole up. If we can eat the fish, we can eat the animals, too. We need a source of fresh water and good hunting. Fruits, too, or whatever this place has. We’ve got to give Eric a chance to get better, and then we’ll be stronger and better able to find a permanent place to stay.”

“Permanent?” Jeff asked. They were close enough to the shelter for him and Eric to hear her.

“We have to assume permanent,” Kira said, looking everywhere but at her wounded lover. “If help comes that’s great, but until it does we have to figure otherwise. We’ve got rechargers for the energy packs and Eric made plenty of ammunition for my rifle before we landed. Means sleeping in shifts and everything.”

“Ah… paradise,” Eric muttered,
and then he grimaced and covered his side with his hand.

Kira bit her lip and looked away. “I’ll take first watch.” When — if — Eric died from his injuries
, it would take some time. They had a day or two at least, she figured. A day or two before she’d need strength she didn’t know if she had. A day or two before she’d need to see just how truly gone Emily really was.

####

Part 2: The Colony

Chapter 1

“They had a transport ship — No way they could land that on a planet!” The brown haired man talking was soft spoken in spite of his derisive tone.  The woman at the radar station looked at the speaker and chewed on the piercing in her lip. It was one of many piercings adorning her face and shaven scalp.

“Something you want to add, Lizzie?”

She jerked and spun to look at the new speaker, the captain of the
Black Hole
. She nodded. “Klous…yes, I mean, yes Sir, that is. I found the
Rented Mule
, it crashed. In the water, but less than a couple hundred feet deep.”

“Is that all?” Klous snorted. He ran his fingers through his spiked blond hair and stared at Lizzie until she turned away. “The Hole isn’t much better than that transport was for planetary operations.”

“I can set us down nearby. Lizzie’s coordinates are just off a shore.” The speaker was Aran Black, the pilot of the
Black Hole
.

“It’d be a shame to come all this way and go with nothing.” The unassuming man’s eyes were wide with what the Captain knew to be excitement. He’d known the man far too long to misjudge it, and far too long to repress the shudder at what it meant.

“Don’t go freaking out, Cooper, I’ll have your ass confined,” Klous growled at him.

“Any survivors?”

Klous craned his neck to see the only survivor from the failed boarding attempt of the
Rented Mule
standing there. The Captain’s eyes narrowed dangerously but before he could rebuke the man for his uninvited interruption Lizzie spoke up.

“I think so.” She still stared at the display in front of her while her hands were pressed firmly against the data induction pad on her station. She nodded a moment later, the rings in her ears jangling against one another. “Yes, I’ve got more wreckage on the shore.”

“More wreckage?”

“Not a crash site, but it looks like they used a smaller craft to evacuate the transport.”

“No signs of life though?”

“Oh, lots! The entire planet is alive,” Lizzie paused to look at them. She shrugged, causing more jangles. “I’ve never seen readings like this. I think maybe Earth would have looked like this thousands of years ago. Huge forests, warm temperatures, and incredible numbers of animals or other life forms moving.”

“Humans? Or….”

“Too big for people. No signs of cities or building
s either.”

Klous grunted. “I don’t like it. We were supposed to board the damn ship in space! We get the cargo and split the bounty on the target. This is a pile of rat shit is what it is!”

“Klous, this system isn’t on any charts. This planet – it don’t exist.”

“What’s that mean?” The Captain growled back at Aran.

“Means this place hasn’t been discovered yet. We’re outside the core worlds. Shit, we’re outside the rim systems by light years! Salvage in space is claimed by whoever finds it…”

“This is a planet, not salvage.”

“All the other planets humans have settled and terraformed they knew about beforehand. Settlers and engineers were sent with that in mind. This place is ready!”