Hunted (2 page)

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

“These things attacked you?” he asked, nodding
towards the alien. “Unprovoked?”

“We didn’t even know they were there until they
started killing us.”

Knutsen shook his head in wonder. The
Argoss
was known to have had a major tech failure, but to find out that it
had been caused deliberately made sense only if the mutants had
posed a serious threat to the mission. The captain may have
reasoned that it was better to preserve the arc for the other
colonists, than let it fall prey to the mutated crew. If every
living thing on board was killed, then the ship would arrive at its
final destination and wait there, hale and whole until the other
arcs arrived. And this was just what had happened. Except the
mutants had evidently survived.

From the cockpit, a shrill siren sounded. With a
nod, Knutsen ordered Chu to check it out. Stephanie crawled back
into the cockpit. Almost immediately she was back, her face drained
of its natural color.

“Pål! You’d better get in here, now.”

Knutsen crawled back into the cockpit. Stephanie
pointed to a series of readouts on the port side of his station
where the lights had changed from green to yellow. The drive was
not dead. It was going critical.

His eyes widened at the sight, but he wasted no time
trying to reverse the problem. There was no fix for this. He leaned
in towards Stephanie, speaking loudly in order to be heard over the
incessant siren.

“Get everything out that we can carry. We need to
make it to the minimum safe zone. I don’t know how much time we’ve
got, but I’m not taking any chances.”

Stephanie nodded, pulling a medkit from a bulkhead.
She made her way into the hold where she punched in the code to
open the weapons locker. Knutsen followed, pushing two emergency
kits with him. The kits contained basic field rations for three
days, a small amount of water and foil blankets.

Stephanie slung the heavy multigun—the same she
had used to defend the airlock against the mutants—over her
shoulder. It was designed to be used in any situation and could be
configured for a variety of lethal and non-lethal payloads. She
checked to ensure that it was set to 
High-Charge
, a
killing level.

Through either luck, or judgment on Knutsen’s part,
the shuttle had come to rest on its belly. The airlock should be
the easiest exit but a quick glance through the porthole showed
only the fine red sand of Palsenz covering the tempered glass. The
hatch was clearly buried.

That left only one way out, the payload doors.
Stephanie hit the release mechanism, then punched in her
authorization code. With a groan, the ceiling began to split,
widening as the overhead hatches opened outwards like the ribs of a
great beast, splayed to reveal the tender organs within.

Instantly a fierce wind carried sand into the bay,
whipping around in a frenzied gyre. Stephanie turned to Jensen who
was helping himself to a multigun.

“We need to get as far away from the shuttle as we
can. The drive is overloading. Take this medkit and start
climbing.”

She passed him the medical supplies and pointed to
the far end of the bay where handholds set into the bulkheads
formed a ladder. Jensen nodded, slinging the rifle over one
shoulder and medkit over the other. He made his way past his dead
crew and the mutant, giving the latter a slightly wider berth, then
began to climb, head turned to the side to avoid the stinging
sand.

Stephanie watched Jensen climb, noting how he
struggled to raise his right arm. Not good. Knutsen appeared at her
shoulder and she jumped.

“Hell, you gave me a start.”

His answering look held no apology. He just
pushed her towards the ladder. She understood. No time to waste on
pleasantries. She scaled the ladder quickly, climbing out, turning
her head from the caustic wind and the tiny sand grains needling
her face.

She slid down the fuselage, onto the stubby wing of
the shuttle, then jumped, landing next to Jensen. The jolt when she
hit the ground almost knocked the wind out of her. Nevertheless,
she slapped Jensen on the shoulder and tried her best to give him a
smile.

“Congratulations, Officer Jensen. You’re the first
man to set foot on Palsenz.”

He nodded, but did not look like he appreciated the
distinction as he was trying to shield his eyes from the sand.
Equally, Stephanie did not feel anything special for being the
first woman on the planet. If they survived, maybe then.

A moment later and Knutsen joined them. They set
off, making their way through twisted rocks that coiled and spired
at odd angles, many of the fingers of stone ending in points, like
granite daggers. Care was needed. A fall here could be deadly.

The wind howled, almost drowning out her voice.
Nevertheless, Stephanie attempted to shout above it. “How far to be
safe?”

Knutsen strained to hear. He grimaced as he worked
out the meaning of the almost jumbled words that came to him.

“At least three kilometers,” he shouted in reply,
holding up three fingers.

Stephanie nodded and leaned into the wind, pushing
hard to make progress. It would have been smarter to go the
opposite direction where the wind would help propel them, but the
almost sheer wall of stone that lay there contradicted that
instinct. Had the shuttle changed its angle of descent by just a
tiny margin, they would have impacted the cliff face, and that
would have been that.

They began their trek away from the shuttle. After
some time, Stephanie found she could walk naturally, no longer
needing to lean into the wind. She checked her wrist display,
measuring their progress. Barely two klicks. That was not far
enough!

They pushed on. Finally, a break in the wind allowed
them to observe their surroundings in more detail. With the sand no
longer menacing her eyes, Stephanie raised her head. There was a
rocky outcrop nearby and she quickly clambered up before turning to
survey the horizon, marveling at the vista of an alien planet.
Home.

What she saw was a bleak, forbidding landscape of
rolling red sand dunes and oddly striated rocks that rose from the
ground like bony fingers. It was like a garden of stone, she
thought.

She turned to look back the way they had come.
Already their footprints had been erased and the shuttle was no
longer in sight. She felt a pang of regret for its loss. She and
Pål Knutsen had been assigned to the
Heimdal
as cadets and
it had practically been home to them. Like many co-workers, they
had taken their relationship to another level, becoming lovers. It
was common for those who worked in close proximity to marry and
have children. Any stigma that had once existed had long since
disappeared within their insular culture where perpetuating the
species was more important than outmoded social mores. Of course,
this did not mean that there was not a chain of command. Stephanie
was First Officer on the Heimdal, but it was Pål who had made
Captain. That meant his word was law, even here, on the planet’s
surface.

“Orders, Captain?”

“Our first priority is to get out of the blast zone,
which I believe we have done. Next is shelter. I think these sand
storms might get rough.”

Jensen smiled grimly at that. “Not much shelter
here, by the looks of things.”

“No,” Knutsen conceded. “We’ll just have to keep
moving and hope we get lucky.”

From her vantage point, Stephanie could see further
than the others. Her brows furrowed. “I can see something.” She
pointed to the east. The others turned to look. “Something glinted.
Like a reflection off glass.”

“Must be wreckage from the
Heimdal
,” Knutsen
asserted.

“No,” she replied. “Not that far east. It doesn’t
match our approach vector. There’s no way there could be anything
from the wreck there.”

Stephanie continued to peer into the distance, but
there was nothing except endless sand. Then suddenly she saw it
again. A glint, and it was gone. Could it be a reflection from
binoculars? She hopped down from the mound, landing in a crouch,
and opened her mouth to speak.

They felt the explosion before they heard it. The
ground heaved, throwing them down, Jensen’s face contorting in
pain. The horizon behind them flared into white. Then it darkened
as a huge cloud of sand rose into the sky, consuming it, clouding
out the sun. Then came the wind, howling, tearing at them, ripping
their clothes with wave after wave of jagged sand.

Stephanie covered her head with her hands and
screwed her eyes tightly closed. Then as suddenly as it had begun,
it was over.

They climbed to their feet, dusting themselves off,
shaking sand from hair and clothes. Jensen spat, saliva and blood
instantly absorbed by the desert. For a moment, no one spoke.

“I’m sorry,” said Knutsen. It was not clear if he
was addressing the shuttle, his crew or their passenger. Stephanie
laid a hand on his arm.

“Pål, before the explosion . . .” she paused to
formulate the right words in her head. “I saw something. It looked
to me like someone was using binoculars out there.”

Captain Knutsen twisted his mouth in a wry grimace
and shook his head. “Couldn’t be. There’s no way a rescue party
would be here so soon.”

Stephanie held his gaze, her brown eyes holding his
blue. “I know. That’s what worries me.”

He turned to look in the direction where she had
seen the flash of light. “You don’t think . . .”

“I don’t know what to think. But something is coming
this way.”

Jensen looked at them, his gaze alternating from one
to the other. He seemed to be having problems breathing but he
managed to spit out a single word.

“What?”

Stephanie bit her bottom lip. “If it’s not a rescue,
then either they’re indigenous, or it’s
them
. From the
Argoss
. The mutants.”

Jensen laughed nervously, until he realized she
wasn’t joking. “You can’t be serious!”

Knutsen nodded. “Makes sense. There were shuttles
missing from the hull of the
Argoss
. We just assumed they
were destroyed or lost during the journey. Maybe those things
used
them to make landfall.”

Stephanie unslung her multigun, holding it in combat
ready position. “If that’s true, then we need to get as far away
from them as possible. I don’t plan to die on this rock.”

Knutsen spat sand and wiped his mouth. “Agreed.
Let’s move out.”

They set off, walking as quickly as they could in
the shifting sand. Changing direction to the west, they used
whatever rocks they could find for cover, trying to make it as hard
as possible to be seen by whatever was coming. Thankfully, it
appeared that there would be little chance of anyone following
their footprints, as the wind started to pick up again and they
were soon erased.

Jensen stumbled and Knutsen moved to help, wrapping
one of the man’s arms over his shoulder. Supporting half his
weight, Knutsen urged him on.

The day ended abruptly as the sun sank below the
horizon. Darkness was not absolute, as the evening sky was awash
with stars. Palsenz’ own tiny moon appeared as a bright dot, moving
over the surface of the night.

Exhaustion brought the group to a halt soon enough,
and they huddled in the lee of an overhanging rock that was not
quite a cave, though it did provide some protection from the
wind.

Stephanie rolled a head-sized rock into the half
circle of their shelter. Then she fired her multigun with a low
power setting at it. She held a continuous beam on the stone until
it began to glow white-hot.

That done, they shared some rations and sat back,
the heat radiating from the rock suffusing them with more than just
its warmth. It comforted them, made them feel somehow less
vulnerable.

Jensen carefully maneuvered himself into a supine
position. His breathing was ragged, and he had a waxy complexion to
this skin. Stephanie put two fingers on his neck.

“Relax. I just want to check your pulse.”

Jensen gave the barest of nods. His pulse was fast.
She did not need to time it to know he was experiencing problems.
Plus he felt hot. There was a thermometer in the medkit and she
fished it out, pressing it against his neck. A moment later it
beeped. 103 degrees. He was burning up.

She poked about in the medkit bag and found a strip
of pills marked ‘General Antibiotic.’ She examined the
instructions, then popped two out. She passed Jensen a bottle of
water and the pills.

“We’ll need to keep a watch during the night,” said
Knutsen.

Jensen struggled to raise himself, but Stephanie
pushed him back down. “No. Not you. You’re on meds, have a damaged
lung and a fever. We’ll manage.”
Knutsen nodded approvingly. “Steph, I’m pretty wiped. Can you take
the first two hours, then wake me?”

“Absolutely. Don’t worry. I’ll keep the rock
hot.”

* * *

Stephanie didn’t wake Knutsen at the appointed time.
Instead, she took a walk, making her way to a high point of jutting
stone a short distance from the camp. She climbed it, then settled
in, wedged between two twisting spires. From her position she could
see the sleeping men, the heat rock still glowing a faint red. But
she could also see the wider plain, and even though it was night,
there was sufficient light to make out the nearby rocks and
dunes.

She snapped open the sight-port on the multigun and
lifted it to her eye. Scanning the horizon, focusing on the east,
she searched for any sign of movement. Nothing. Switching to
infrared, she tried again.

The desert was an even tone of yellow with patches
here and there of darker umber, indicating warmer sand. But there
was nothing ‘hot’ out there. Stephanie let out her breath, unaware
she had been holding it. Whatever had been trying to track them was
gone.