Wayfarer: AV494 Read online

  “Ship’s hull’s only a quarter-inch-thick.” Marco winked. “Shuttle’s got thicker sides.”

  “Thanks.” She frowned.

  He cinched the black nylon strap and stood. “Beats me why they worry about weight. Not like this thing has to float.”

  “They’re worried about mass, not weight… inertia.” Kerys wiped her hands on her jumpsuit and spent a few seconds staring at indentations the handle left on her fingers. This is it. Another few minutes, and I’ll be one of fewer than a hundred people to set foot on this planet. Excitement whirled in her gut.

  “So, you ready?” He pressed his fist to her shoulder and gave a light shove.

  “Yeah.” She grinned. “You?”

  Marco leaned back, stretching. “Been waiting three years for this.”

  She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and chuckled as she headed for the same door Don went out. The space on the other side reminded her of a tiny commercial passenger vessel, twenty seats arranged in two rows of pairs. Don and Paula―engaged in a discussion planning the excavation―occupied the first two on the right side.

  Vibration seeped into her boots as the cargo ramp door closed, sealing against the hull with a clank.

  Guillien had taken the last aisle seat on the left row, its back against the wall separating the seating area from the cargo hold. Foster stood in the aisle, looking around as if unsure where to put himself. Kerys exchanged a pleasant smile as she scooted past him, and eased herself into the first seat in the left row, across the aisle from Don. Marco slipped into the seat behind her, leaning out to eavesdrop on the two bosses.

  A short passageway continued forward to the flight deck, where a figure in a helmet sat sipping coffee while occasionally poking a button on the console overhead. She rubbed her hands back and forth on her thighs out of nervousness rather than cold. A dull grey panel marked the wall to her left where a window ought to be.

  Damn. Would’ve liked a view. She frowned at the blank wall before looking to her right. “Doctor Bouchard? Any chance of a better view?”

  “… at least two days from landing. It’s regrettable, but policy.” Don turned to look at her so fast his white hair fluffed up. “Of course. We’ll be able to walk up front once we’ve breached the atmosphere.”

  “Attention everyone,” said a man’s voice from overhead speakers. “This is your pilot speaking. I’m afraid I have some bad news. The in-flight movie has been cancelled.”

  Marco feigned a groan of annoyance.

  “We’ll be departing the Avasar 4 in about one minute. Just waiting on the final system checks. Flight time to Wayfarer Outpost is estimating at fifty-two minutes, but that may change based on wind conditions. If anyone forgot anything on the ship, speak up now. I’m about to depressurize the bay outside.”

  Kerys looked around. Foster hurried into a seat midway down the right aisle and strapped in. After craning her neck to steal a glance at Guillen―who appeared to be sleeping―she faced forward and secured her belt. Nervousness built, and she found herself absentmindedly tapping her fingers together.

  The room surrendered to silence for a short while before a loud hissing noise outside made her jump.

  “All right everyone―at this point, opening any doors is a really bad idea,” said the pilot. After a pause, he chuckled. “Need to ask everyone to stay seated and buckled in for at least the first ten minutes.”

  She clasped her hands together at her chin, trying not to shake from eagerness. Everything she’d ever dreamed of since graduation waited for her down on the planet’s surface.

  A soft rumbling from behind built into a mild roar that rattled the ship. A second later, her body lurched up against the harness as the shuttle dropped straight down. She closed her eyes, grunting with a shift in weight that pinned her against the back of her seat.

  Marco yelled, but she couldn’t tell if he cheered or cried out in fear.

  Four breaths later, the acceleration faded, leaving her floating, kept in her seat only by the safety harness. Her stomach did a backflip at the zero-g.

  Paula said something the engines drowned out.

  “Just breathe,” said Don in a raised voice.

  “Why is it so loud?” shouted Marco. “Isn’t this space? Shouldn’t it be like… silent?”

  “If you think this is loud,” said Corporal Guillen, “wait ’til you’re on the way off-planet.”

  “Huh?” yelled Marco.

  “We’re not even using the main engines, the ones that break gravity.” Guillien thrust his hand into the air, mimicking a space ship, before letting it fall into his lap. “Basically, right now, we’re just falling like a rock with wings.”

  “Great,” said Marco.

  “Atmospheric entry in twenty-seven seconds,” said the pilot.

  Marco leaned forward, yelling around the seatback into Kerys’s ear. “Not re-entry?”

  She shrugged. “I guess since we haven’t come from this planet it can’t be re entry, right?”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good point.”

  “Ten seconds,” said the pilot.

  Nine… eight… seven…

  When her mental countdown hit two, the shuttle slammed into a wall of turbulence that made her feel like being in a car rolling down a hill after jumping a guardrail. She screamed, though couldn’t even hear herself over the continuous thunder of the atmosphere battering the hull. All the noise and the shaking gave her nightmares of the shuttle breaking apart. After her lungs emptied, she kept trying to scream, forgetting how to breathe in.

  Eventually, the shuddering ebbed, as did the deafening roar. She gasped for air, and felt a little better about herself since Paula had apparently fainted. Don gave Paula a light shake, which woke her up in a flurry of flailing and screaming.

  “Intense,” said Foster. “Holy crap, that was awesome.”

  Corporal Guillen shrugged. “Air here is thinner than my last post. That drop kinda felt like Earth.”

  Kerys tuned out the soldiers’ subsequent discussion about how ‘rough’ Guillen’s last drop had been, and enjoyed a moment of not being thrown around in her seat. Before long, floating ceased, and she eased down into the cushion.

  “Well, gravity’s back,” said Don.

  “Looks like the skies are friendly,” said the pilot. “Plenty of room up here if anyone wants an aerial view.”

  Kerys unbuckled her harness and sprang to her feet, the first one down the short connecting corridor to the flight deck. A man in a black jumpsuit reclined on a padded chair surrounded by a console full of screens and buttons. One small joystick protruded from the right armrest of the chair, though he didn’t touch it.

  She shot a brief glance at a monitor screen in front of him showing a graphical representation of a flight path, plus various data streams. Not bothering to attempt reading it, she turned her gaze to the wide cockpit window, admiring luminous puffs of vapor washing over the ship. As far as she could see, the dark indigo sky glowed with azure clouds. The local star sat beyond view, but imparted a glowing golden line across a curved horizon of glimmering onyx.

  The others, except for Corporal Guillen, shuffled in behind her and formed a horseshoe around the pilot’s chair. Marco pressed into Kerys’s from the right, squeezing her hip against the wall.

  “So beautiful,” whispered Paula.

  “Sorry,” Marco mumbled. “Little tight in here.”

  “It’s all right.” Kerys paid him no mind, mesmerized by the exterior.

  “Amazing.” Don whistled in awe. “Only a handful of people have ever seen this.”

  Kerys quivered with excitement. “It’s almost scary to think of how many planets exist out here… and humanity could never hope to see even a significant fraction of them.”

  The crew fell silent for a few minutes. Gradually, the blackness of space faded to a dark blue, and the curvature of the ground flattened out. The shuttle dropped well under cloud level, and a great expanse of glittering black dirt spre
ad out below. Silvery rocks dotted the surface here and there, gleaming like chunks of pure silicon in the sunlight.

  Those rocks have to be the size of houses to see them from this high up.

  Metallic grey mountains to the left caught the glare of the sun as well, but she tried to stare at them anyway despite having to squint. A few minutes later, Marco tapped her arm and pointed at an ocean far off to the right, a rich blue-green hue with teal-capped waves.

  “Water…” whispered Kerys, leaning forward.

  “It might look like water, but it could be liquid ammonia.” The pilot tapped the console, causing the primary display to switch to a diagram of the shuttle. He seemed satisfied, and switched back to the flight path.

  Everyone swayed to the right as the shuttle banked, holding a gradual turn for a few seconds before leveling off.

  “It is water, at least close enough to support some form of plant life here.” Don smiled. “However, I wouldn’t want to drink it.”

  “Hey,” said Marco. “You didn’t touch the stick and the ship just turned… are you even doing anything?”

  The pilot swiveled his chair around to face the crew. “Yep. I’m fulfilling regulations. These things are so automated now, the only reason I’m still even here is due to bureaucracy. Oh, I do have to push a start button.”

  “Bureaucracy?” asked Kerys. “Aren’t you a pilot?”

  “Well, yes…” He tapped a winged emblem on his breast pocket over the name ‘1LT Serrano, A.’ “On contract to Avasar Biotech. If I’m not here, the company loses about three-point-eight billion in assistance. Military requires a live pilot. Avasar hates paying me.”

  “Well, I feel a lot better having a human in the loop.” Paula smiled at Lieutenant Serrano. “I don’t feel comfortable trusting my life to computers.”

  “Yeah,” said Marco. “One lazy idiot in a cube somewhere forgets a comma and we crash.”

  Lieutenant Serrano grinned. “This software’s thirty years old. They wrote it back in like 2093 or something. Bugs are fixed.” He swung around to face forward again. “Sometimes I do take the stick for old times’ sake.”

  “Look there.” Paula pointed ahead and left.

  A swath of color spread over the glittery black ground straight ahead, like a massive patch of lichen growing on a rock. Ribbons of violet, periwinkle blue, white, and shades in between spanned an area that had to be hundreds of miles across.

  “What is it?” asked Private Foster.

  “That’s the forest,” said Don. “It’s located in an area exposed to wind coming off the ocean. This is the largest collection of plant life on this planet. There are other localized pockets, but they are much smaller.”

  “Looks like moss on LSD,” said Marco.

  Don laughed.

  “The trees here resemble broccoli… only about a hundred feet tall.” Paula held on to the pilot’s chair to steady herself as the shuttle adjusted course to the right a few degrees.

  Kerys peered around at the landscape. Mountains, miles and miles of sparkling black sand, a giant greenish ocean, and a thick run of ‘trees.’ This is like a weird dream. As beautiful as it all looked, everything about this place felt deadly. She swallowed, but refused to let fear chip away at her hope. She’d spend most of her time on this planet in a cavern picking at ruins, or sitting inside an office studying images. The toxicity of the environment wouldn’t matter.

  She let out a slow breath, thought back to yoga class, and tried to center herself, pushing anxiety out into the floor. The shuttle descended to about five hundred feet, sailing over black sand desert for twenty minutes before another, much smaller, line of mountains rose into view on the right. The mirror-like surface caught the sunlight with a flash that caused the canopy to auto-darken.

  “There we are.” Don pointed ahead. “The reason we’re here is under that ridge.”

  A blinking yellow triangle appeared on the windscreen, superimposed on a speck of white.

  “We’re in transponder range of Wayfarer.” Lieutenant Serrano tapped a button on a touchscreen to the left of the primary display before poking the triangle. “Wayfarer ground control, this is Avasar-4 shuttle. We’re three minutes out and looking good. Requesting clearance to land.”

  “Copy, shuttle.” A woman’s voice emanated from speakers overhead. “Pad’s clear. Come on down.”

  Kerys stared wide-eyed at the distant forest as it grew from a patch of ‘moss’ to a collection of ominous stalks that towered over the nearby landscape. Beneath the rainbow of broccoli-like florets forming the canopy, the trunk of each ‘tree’ had the same dull periwinkle blue color. Dark spaces between them stirred a deep and primal unease, as if a monster from a childhood storybook waited for her in the shrouded gloom.

  A collection of white structures drew closer upon the inky dunes. Eight pods of varying size clustered around a central dome several stories taller, everything connected with silver and white tubes. Kerys grinned, thinking it looked like a bunch of take-out food containers someone had plugged together with bendy straws―or perhaps an insanely expensive hamster habitat.

  Red lights blinked in a steady rhythm from a group of antennas at the dome’s top. To the west, a huge, rectangular structure emitted plumes of white vapor. North of it, a pair of smaller rectangles sat almost close enough to touch, glowing with many small windows around the outside. Judging by their spacing, she assumed those to be crew quarters. A tall cube-shaped building stood to the east of the central dome, with a pair of oblong structures at the southeast corner. Despite having been in operation for years, the buildings of Wayfarer Outpost gleamed white, as if taken out of their packaging only hours ago.

  A huge hexagonal pad sat a short distance northeast of the outpost, the shuttle’s likely destination. Moving dark spots against the metal grating became evident as people in e-suits once the shuttle got closer—a group waiting for them.

  “Gotta ask everyone to go grab a seat again,” said Lieutenant Serrano. “If someone gets hurt during landing, it’s on me.”

  The crew shuffled back to the seating area. Kerys buckled in, but excitement kept her leg bouncing.

  Deceleration made her lean forward. Engine noise changed pitch, growing higher and louder for a few seconds. The shuttle came to a stop in midair, rotated to the left, and descended. Tangible relief swept over the crew at the creak of the landing pads absorbing the ship’s weight.

  Lieutenant Serrano walked in, without his helmet. “There’s e-suits for everyone in the cargo hold in lockers along the starboard side. The door’s not going to be opened until everyone’s had their suits checked by either myself, Corporal Guillen, or Private Foster.”

  Murmurs of agreement spread over the crew. Kerys followed them to the cargo hold and stopped at the first available locker. She grasped the handle, but hesitated at the sight of ‘Trem, Marco’ written on tape.

  He tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at hers, two doors to the left.

  “Thanks.”

  She sidestepped and opened her locker, revealing a dark suit with oversized metal boots and reinforced matte-black panels on the forearms, elbows, knees, and chest. A blue metallic collar ringed the neck, matching the underside of the helmet. It had some similarities to the suit she’d worn on her last job, though its backpack unit looked about half the size. She pulled it out to check it over, trying to decide if they’d given her a newer model, or gone cheap. The fasteners and clips appeared to be more or less in the same place. A hatch at the lower right corner of the backpack pod bore the label ‘CBP.’

  Curiosity got the better of her. She fussed at it until the panel opened, sliding back on small, hinged arms to expose a grey plastic disc about four inches across. Cyan-hued light glowed from the seam around it.

  “First time?” asked Corporal Guillen, at her side.

  Kerys startled. “Umm. Not really. Just haven’t seen this model of suit before.” She shifted her eyes to the left. Warmth spread over her face at his proximity, at
his chest hovering inches from her arm. He’d already donned his suit, except for the helmet, and gained a few inches of height.

  “The design isn’t that new. These are operations suits, for delicate work. You probably used the Galileos on your last site?”

  “Yeah.” She grasped a folding handle set into the disc, twisted it, and pulled out a cylinder nine inches long filled with a gelatinous blue mass. The empty cylinder walls emitted strong white light. “Never saw one of these before though.”

  “That’s the next-gen re-breather filter. Based on a synthetic bacteria or something.”

  “Cyanobacteria,” said Don from across the room. “That little canister is equivalent to having an entire forest of trees in your backpack.”

  Corporal Guillien gestured at it. “The Galileos had about a seventy-two hour limit before the filter pack needed a recharge, but they weighed fifty-four pounds. These Nomad suits are good for about thirty before you need to swap out the pod. Course, ya ask me, I wouldn’t feel too safe past twenty.”

  “Right…” She put the canister back, closed the hatch, and pulled the suit open. He motioned to help, but she slipped into it without hesitation. “I have worn e-suits before, you know.”

  He smiled. “These are a lot lighter and more comfortable. Helmet’s got a wider field of view, and the gloves are thinner, so you can do whatever it is you scientist types do. Only real problem with them is they put the fasteners in an awkward place. Hard to work them yourself.”

  She stooped to hit buttons on the boots, which caused them to split open on powered struts. “Us scientist types?” A grin spread over her face, and she found herself not minding his hovering so close. “I suppose you’ll have to show me how to put this thing on.”

  He chuckled, indicating the boots with a nod. “Looks like you got the hang of it.”

  Kerys stared at his perfect face for a second or two before she caught herself doing it, and averted her eyes while stepping into the suit. As soon as her weight pressed down, the metal boots closed around her normal boots with a soft hiss. She stuck her arms in the sleeves, then reached up and guided the rigid helmet ring down over her head.