Into the Void

Chapter 16

He woke up early the next morning. Someone had moved him from the passenger compartment to one of the cots in the cargo space. Damon walked over to the cot with a soft whir of servo motors, he was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts and his cybernetics reflected the lights from the ship's ceiling. Nate blinked against the glare coming off Damon’s prosthetics, his eyes hurt and his head pounded.

“How are you feeling?” asked Damon.

“Like I have a bad hangover,” Nate replied.

Damon handed him a cup of water. “Sometimes your first gene mod will do that, you should be fine after breakfast.”

Nate sat up and drank the contents of the cup greedily. “Catch me on what’s been going on,” he said.

“Well we didn’t get far exploring yesterday, Vance assured everyone he could drive the rover but it’s older than we thought, it still uses a clutch and a stick shift. We managed to limp it back home and Izzy saved most of the engine, I see that Onyx gave a nice little history textbook to put you to sleep, it worked great, you’ve been out for almost sixteen hours now. We had some medical monitors hooked onto you for a bit, everything scanned in normal so you’re cleared to come outside with the rest of us. I don’t suppose you know how to drive do you?”

Nate smiled, thinking back to summer afternoons spent racing rusted out jeeps through the mud with his cousins. “Actually I do,” he said. “And I’m damn good at it.” He pulled a laser repeater and a handful of microfission cells out of a locker and hung the small weapon off his belt.

After a small breakfast of more dried rations the crew piled into the rover. Nate climbed into the rover’s driver seat and started the engine, surprised to see a full heads up display flicker to life across the windshield. The rover plodded off through the forest. Bouncing gently over ruts and fallen logs. Nate watched the scenery drift by slowly. The trees were tall and spindly, growing in long curves and bends, the trunks were dark and fleshy and the very top of each tree sported a spherical patch of green leaves so pale they were nearly white. As the rover rumbled onwards flocks of four winged birds scattered in their wake. Tall deer-like mammals bounded away ahead of them on sinewy legs, their great leaps launching them forwards at an alarming pace as they danced expertly between trees and over obstacles. Eventually the forest thinned and the rover’s tires bit deeply into mud as it wallowed through a series of small ponds. The ponds were spaced evenly across a wide swath of open terrain. Each pond was filled with muddy, swampy water, and rimmed with an upward sloping crest of rock. As the rover spun through the mud, Nate clicked on the vehicle's small computer and asked it to do a basic pattern recognition scan. Something about the ponds seemed off, they were too uniform to be entirely natural.

The computer chimed that it was finished, and reported that the ponds matched the pattern of craters left behind after an orbital bombardment. He scowled at the computer, that couldn’t be right, nobody would bomb an uninhabited planet. He brought the rover to a stop and spent a minute peering at the sensor control panel, eventually he found what he was looking for and booted up the magnetic sensors. He watched the tiny display as a slowly expanding blue ring grew outwards from the gold dot that represented the rover. The display lit up with long green lines and shapes. He queried the computer again and it told him the magnetic returns were likely from buried pipes and wires. they were potentially sitting on the ruins of an intelligent alien civilization. He began to smile but his grin quickly fell into a frown as the memory of the brutally butchered bodies on the dead ship flashed before his eyes.

He opened a radio channel to the team. “I think I found the source of those weird sensor pings we were getting at the camp,” he said. The security team left the rover and swept the area. Nate relayed all the information the rover’s computer had told him. The all clear came from the security team, and he stepped out of the rover onto the rocky patch of ground they’d stopped on, drawing his repeater on his way out of the cab. He held the repeater close, its weight and solidity comforting, and stared out at the terrain. The field of tall pale grass was broken only by outcroppings of pale stone, breaking through the earth like the bleached bones of a dead giant. He glanced down at his exo-suit with a grimace. The suit’s coloration was excellent for spotting teammates but terrible for hiding. Feeling terribly exposed, he patted the series of pouches strapped across his belt, making sure he had packed enough ammunition. The silence in the swamp was overbearing, there were no birds here, no insects, not even the sound of the wind. Only dead, empty silence.