For Day 1 I'm on track! Woo! Here's what I wrote today:
Life Among the Metaloids
Every time Damien Lee made the trip
from a starship down to a planet his mind took him back to the landing on
Dunbar during the war. Every time.
Damien shook himself away from
those memories of long ago. This was a new planet and a new time; a second
chance. Now Damien was the Security Officer on a scientific mission to newly
discovered planet. In just under a minute he would be among the first twelve
humans to step foot on Tappman.
The Captain knew his trade, Damien
had to give him that. The shuttle descended smoothly through the upper
atmosphere towards the scenic, seemingly undisturbed surface of Tappman. Beautiful blue lakes and rivers, wild green
forests, and towering mountain ranges dominated the view outside Damien’s window.
The shuttle touched down beside one
of the lakes. Still in their spacesuits, Captain Kharn and his wife were the
first to step outside. Everyone else, including Damien, followed. Several of
the scientists were clutching fancy gadgets and taking readings. Damien had his
gun out. The satellites and probes had detected only plants, but he didn’t
believe there was such a things as too
careful.
“Well?” Captain Kharn asked. The
Captain was always just on the edge of sounding perturbed by how long each task
was taking.
The Chief Science Officer grinned
like the overzealous goofball he was. “All clear!”
The cheers were cut off by the hiss
of air from the helmets of the team’s spacesuits disengaging their locking
mechanisms. Damien took a deep breath. The air smelled fresh and clean, but
they were wasting daylight. He glanced around. The science-types were all
milling about, congratulating one another without a care in the world.
“All right, listen up!” Damien
shouted. His voice boomed, drowning out general hullabaloo of celebration.
“We’re in the open and the clock is ticking. Get those supply crates out of the
cargo hold and start setting up camp. A trained team can set up a fortified
camp in under four minutes, I doubt you apes could put together your little science
club in the next two hours. Prove me wrong! Move! Move! Move!”
They moved.
Nothing put the fear of God into
science-types like a good shouting. It was Damien’s heartfelt opinions that
eggheads like these were not yelled at enough during their formative years, and
as such they tended to grow up to be whiny little babies.
Motion detectors went up in a ring
one hundred meters around the shuttle.
Tents were set up in the northwest quadrant. Lab equipment and sterile
facilities took up the whole eastern half of their camp. That left the
southwest for hygiene, a dining hall, and the backup generator just in case
something interrupted the power being distributed by the shuttle’s reactor.
“One hour, forty-seven minutes.”
Damien shook his head. “I guess you apes surprised me after all.”
“Good work, people!” The Captain
called jovially. “Who’s hungry?”
While dinner was being prepared two
of the scientists sought Damien out near his tent. He could remember their
names were Phoenix and Kendra, but their scientific specialty eluded him; no
doubt their titles were filled with long words that hadn’t even been invented
when Damien was his school. They looked terribly young.
“Captain Kharn says we need your
permission to do our first survey of the area,” the one who looked especially
young, Kendra, announced.
Phoenix nodded beside her
enthusiastically.
Damien grabbed his gun. “Lead the
way.”
Kendra led them beyond the
perimeter towards the mountain range to the northwest. Damien scanned their
surroundings, but all he saw were plants and water. Kendra seemed to know
exactly where she wanted to go, they kept on the same bearing even when they
had to veer around streams.
“Can I ask how you got the scar on
your jaw?” Phoenix asked as they walked.
“You can ask.”
Phoenix smirked. She had the cocky
grin of a fighter pilot. “You were on Dunbar.” It wasn’t a question.
Damien tried not to sound
surprised. “What makes you say that?”
“My old man told me once that the
only military man who doesn’t love to brag about his scars is a man who made it
out of that hellhole.”
Damien snorted derisively.
“Everyone thinks they know about Dunbar. Did your father actually serve or is
he some kind of shrink with a talk show and an opinion about everything?”
Phoenix drew herself up proudly.
“My father is Admiral Chester Drake.”
“I’ll be damned. I’ll have to buy
your old man a beer if I ever meet him. I owe that man my life.” Drake had
taken his fleet on what everyone else thought was a suicide mission to cut off
the enemy’s reinforcements to Dunbar. It had turned the tide in the battle and
ultimately the war.
“I was going to join the Fleet
until they quit building warships. I mean, my father could have gotten me in on
one of the few still in operation, but I wanted to earn my own way in the
world.”
“How very admirable of you.”
“What about you, did you leave
before the cutbacks or did you get the ‘thank you for your service’ letter like
my dad?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
That smirk crept back onto
Phoenix’s face. “I’m a scientist. It’s my job to be inquisitive.”
“Oh yeah? Then why aren’t you more
weirded out by the lack of animals on this rock?”
“That’s one of the fascinating
aspects of Tappman we’re here to study,” Phoenix explained. “There’s water,
plants, the right mix of molecules in the air, but no life besides vegetation.
Beautiful vegetation, but it’s still highly unusual.”
“What about germs? Insects?
Anything like that?”
“A surprisingly limited number of
microbes were found by our probes and no insects thus far. Curious, no?”
“I think it’s more creepy than
anything. A dead planet. What keeps other life from flourishing?”
Phoenix laughed. “Are you always
this melancholy? Aren’t you even a little bit excited to be one of the first
people on a new planet?”
“Kid, when you’ve seen as many
planets as I have, you learn not to get your hopes up for any particular one.”
“Excuse me? Kid?” Phoenix stopped and put her hands on her hips. “You’re what,
five years older than me? Eight, tops! What makes your so wise and worldly?”
Dunbar,
Damien wanted to say, but that hadn’t made him wise, just old. He was beginning
to regret allowing this conversation to continue beyond the scar question, but
he was spared having to reply by Kendra.
Kendra had wandered ahead of them,
still on the same bearing she started out on, and now she was shouting, “Oh my
God! You have to come see this!”
Damien and Phoenix sprinted to where
Kendra was crouched beside a pool of murky water glittering in the afternoon
sunlight.
“What’s so special about a puddle?”
Damien started to ask, but he trailed off after “special.” Only one thing
shimmered like that: metal.
Phoenix crouched down beside
Kendra. “Why doesn’t it feel warm this close? Whatever is heating it to a
molten state like this has to be incredibly hot!”
Kendra shook her head. “I have no idea. But it does seem to be liquid
metal. What do you think, steel? Iron? We’ll need to take samples back to camp
in order to be sure.”
The two girls began rapidly
removing science gear from their backpacks and collecting samples. Damien
looked around warily. He had a sinking feeling in his gut that they had just
discovered why there was no animal life on this planet. And his gut was rarely
wrong.
A pinecone fell out of one of the
trees beside the pool and bounced off Damien’s shoulder.
“Look at how the roots of these two
trees are growing into the pool.” Kendra gestured excitedly.
“I’ll take some samples from the
trees,” Phoenix said.
“Here’s a pinecone that fell out of
that one.” Damien reached down and offered her the pinecone that had fallen on
him.
“I don’t it now, you’ve touched it
and contaminated it!”
Damien shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Once they had collected what Damien
considered to be an obscene number of samples from both the pool and the trees,
Kendra tried to convince them to continue further up the hill and into the
mountains.
“Come on, there are still a couple
hours of daylight left! Look what we’ve already discovered and imagine what
else we might find!”
“And we’ll find it tomorrow, we
need to get these back to the lab right away. The others are going to lose
their minds when we show them these!” Kendra chortled.
“Why don’t you go back then? I can
carry on and see what I find.”
“Absolutely not,” Damien interjected.
“We are not splitting up.”
“But I feel like we’re so close to
something huge!” Kendra insisted.
“I said absolutely not.”
For an instant it looked as though
Kendra might have to be physically dragged back, but she reluctantly nodded.
They made their way back to the
shuttle as the two scientists enthusiastically discussed what they might find
once they got the metallic ooze under a microscope. Damien did not say a single
word, but kept a watchful eye out for danger. The forest remained utterly serene,
however, and he began to wonder if he was just being paranoid.
Back at the camp Damien slipped
away so the science-types could revel in the thrill of discovery and divvy up
the samples for examination. It was going to be a late night for everyone else,
so Damien sat down in his tent to clean his guns and sharpen his knives. When
that was done he did calisthenics in hopes of tiring himself out enough to get
some sleep tonight; despite what he had told Phoenix, the first night on a new
planet it was always hard to convince his brain to shut up and let him sleep.
The camp was still buzzing with
activity that night when Damien decided to make an attempt to sleep. When he
pulled off his shirt something odd caught his attention from the corner of his
eye.
A small patch of metal no larger
than his thumbnail was attached to Damien’s skin right above his collarbone.
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