Into the Black: Odyssey One (22 page)

“Pardon?”

“The clothes,” Jaime repeated. “You can’t wear those in a battle-suit. It’ll screw up the monitors and get real messy, if we’re stuck planet-side for too long.”

Milla was about to repeat her last word, but realization clicked in.

Of Course!
She felt like slapping herself for a moment as she realized that the suits were much like her own Spacer Gear. You could be in it for hours, even days depending on the situation, and wearing clothing would prevent certain key functions.

Or at least render them disgustingly messy.

Milla shuddered, but quickly began to shuck her borrowed clothing, looking at the armor with a new eye.

*****

A short while later, Jaime led a tentative Milla out of the locker area and back into the hanger. Surprisingly she found that despite its armor hard exterior, it was fairly comfortable to wear and somehow, she didn’t feel encumbered by the bulky clothing. Though she grimaced, the burning sensation left from connecting its various plumbing connections aren’t something to be enjoyed. Thankfully that was going away quickly; otherwise the armor would be hellish beyond belief.

“It’s lighter than it looks,” Brinks said, when he noticed her look of surprise. “Has to be, otherwise it’d be a hindrance.”

Milla nodded, “it is…” She gingerly tried moving, “…, but, it feels strange to move in.”

Brinks nodded, a knowing expression on his face, “the legs and arms have a series of nano-fibre enhancements. They take some getting used to, but they’ll add about five hundred kilos to your lift capacity and let you jump about forty feet, vertically. Take care though, your step will be a little energetic until you get used to them, so you’d best start now.”

Milla bit her lip as she found out what Brinks meant, a simple step had catapulted her two feet off the deck and landed her face first into a bulkhead. Groaning from the floor, she slowly bent her legs under her and tried to rise to her feet. Instead of slowly rising from the deck, she snapped straight up, stopping only after her feet were six inches off the floor. Landing roughly on the balls of her feet, she balanced herself precariously on her toes while her right arm flailed around, looking for something to steady herself with.

“Whoa! I said take it slow,” Brinks reached out and grabbed her outstretched arm, steadying the young woman with a firm hand. “You practically have to relearn how to walk with these things. The fibres make for a fun step. Don’t make any sudden movements.”

Milla began to shuffle along, as Brinks continued his explanation and impromptu tutorial, “The suit is adaptive. It’ll learn to anticipate how much strength you actually need, but until it maps your habits, you’d better just scuff your feet. Okay?”

“O… okay,” she replied.

Slowly, the young woman progressed from shuffling movements to actual steps, she knew that the suit would undoubtedly prove useful, but it would be difficult to master. Watching the similar suited men over by the shuttle, she marvelled at the apparent ease of their motions.

Roberts walked over from checking the shuttle, “how is she handling the suit, Major?”

“Better than I did when I first tried one,” Brinks smiled, patting Milla’s armor on the shoulder.

He apparently decided that his comment needed some explanation, judging from the look on her face and he shrugged, “I decided to see how good the system actually worked. Put my head through a two-inch scaffold and woke up in a hospital room with a concussion and a purple heart.”

Milla smiled weakly, not understanding how he’d injured his heart, or why it would be purple, but she nodded and continued to walk painfully across the shuttle bay. The suit’s nano-fibres combined with the lack of gravity in the large room, forced Brinks to follow closely behind her and occasionally pull her back down, so the magnetic clamps on her boots could reconnect to the floor.

“Let’s get onto the shuttle the rest of my team is packing the last of the gear now. Once that’s done, we’ll be heading out,” Brinks said after a moment, as much to get his charge safely strapped in, where a null-grav leap wouldn’t wind up breaking her neck.

“Okay, I’ll be glad to sit still for a while,” Milla replied, relieved at the prospect of a chance to sit still and try to assimilate the new skills that she had to master.

*****

Strapped firmly into a tight fitting bolster seat, Milla looked around the interior of the shuttle at the other occupants. She found herself studying the men, as they strapped themselves down into their own bolsters, cinching the four inch wide straps so tightly that they couldn’t move an inch in any direction.

Their uniforms, she noted, varied slightly from the one that Brinks had given her. The main difference was a crumpled bundle of green cloth strapped tightly to some of their shoulders, black cloth on others, and some with no cloth at all. Milla couldn’t fathom what purpose the bundles might serve and was baffled in her attempt to divine, why some of them didn’t have any cloth at all, to say nothing of the color differences.

The first vibrations of the shuttle’s movement shook her from her observations, for a long moment, she didn’t understand the casual demeanor of the flight crew. They weren’t even looking at their controls. Then she realized that the shuttle was dropping out of the shuttle bay through some massive airlock, it wasn’t until the big elevator shuddered to a halt, that the flight crew turned their attention to the job at hand.

“Shuttle One to Odyssey command, requesting clearance on deck two,” the pilot, Milla assumed, spoke softly as she flipped a bank of switches over and illuminated the projected Heads Up Display, or HUD.

The woman sitting behind the shuttles controls had become a consummate professional, reading of the pre-flight checklists and requesting clearance for departure with efficient, clipped tones.

“Confirmed shuttle one. You are cleared for departure on deck two. Good hunting, Samuels.”

The anonymous voice from the control was the signal the crew was waiting for and a moment later, the shuttle was thundering off the deck, slamming Milla sideways into her bolster seat. Seconds later, the nimble little craft roared free of the confines of the Odyssey flight deck and into space.

“Odyssey Command, this is Shuttle One en route to the fourth planet,” Jennifer Samuels said with an easy drawl as she adjusted the course and trimmed down the thruster control.

The shuttle banked lightly and shifted its course toward the fourth planet, its four powerful engines blazing brightly, as the little ship accelerated. Behind them two more shuttles blasted clear of the Odyssey’s flight deck, banking tightly in the opposite direction toward the drifting debris that was once a Drasin capital ship and the flashing beacons of the fallen Archangels.

The fourth planet came rapidly into view, forcing the shuttle to decelerate and alter its course to orbit the barren world. Samuels brought the shuttle into a polar orbit, trying to evade the debris ring that made the equatorial orbit treacherous. Even so light shudders swept through the craft, as the deflectors shouldered bits of debris away from their path.

“Okay, I’m going to start a fast series of orbits to see if the scanners can pick anything up. Lieutenant Savoy, get that portable tachyon array aligned with the shuttles sensor column, so we can scan for modulated signals,” Jennifer Samuels called over her shoulder as she maneuvered the shuttle into a fast orbit of the world.

“Aye aye, Ma’am,” the Lieutenant said as he unsnapped his restraints and floated over to his gear.

It was on the ninth orbit that Savoy succeeded in isolating an encoded signal from the planet’s surface, after a few minutes of puzzling over the code he was startled by a voice from behind his ear. It was the first and only signal they’d received from the planet that looked like life, with the exception of a few of the insect like things that seemed preoccupied with whatever it was that they did on a conquered planet.

“It is a distress signal. Their equipment must be badly damaged though, because we should have picked it up before we left your ship,” Milla was looking over his shoulder at the signal form that was on the sensor display.

“You’re certain?” This was from Major Brinks, who had noticed Milla’s interest in the signal and listened for her judgment.

“Yes.”

Brinks looked at her for a long moment and nodded.

“All right. Jennifer?” Brinks waited until Lt Samuels cocked her head slightly in acknowledgment, never taking her eyes of her instruments, “launch the Carnivores, then take us down to the source of this signal we’ll do a land search for survivors.”

“Aye Sir.”

Chapter 14

The delta-shaped shuttle descended through the planetary atmosphere quickly, cutting a blazing swathe through the sky, as it homed in on the source of the distress signal they had detected from Orbit.

Samuels levelled it out, over a desiccated forest. The small craft banked into a light turn, heading for what appeared to have been a clearing, amidst the forest they were flying over. A clearing that had a squat structure standing squarely in the middle, a structure that was the source of the signal.

Lt Jennifer Samuels gently brought the chunky craft into a hover over a section of the desiccated forest, a short distance from the clearing. “Major, we’re going to need a landing area cut out or else this is going to be a mighty short rescue.”

“Master Sergeant!” Brinks snapped.

“Sir!” One of the smallest men on the shuttle snapped, half rising from his seat as his restraints popped free.

“Deploy four men with cutters. Have them clear a space one hundred meters in diameter for shuttle one,” Brinks told him, as he slid behind a console and accessed the Carnivore information stream.

“Yes Sir,” the Master Sergeant snapped, spun, finger picking four men, seemingly at random. “You heard the Major! Cutters out, we’re kissing dirt, boys!”

*****

The belly of the shuttle slid open and four repelling lines dropped down, followed quickly by four figures, tiny in relation to the delta-shaped mass above them, smoothly sliding down the fifty foot drop, into the dry timber beneath them.

“Okay, we’re clear,” the figures looked up as an equipment crate began slowly descending toward them.

Two of the figures gently guided the swinging crate to a steady landing, while the two others began a sweeping survey of the area, their weapons held at ready. Within minutes the crate was opened and the contents were assembled into two laser cutters, just small enough to be wielded by hand.

“Shuttle one, the cutter team is beginning procedure.”

Powerful lasers sliced through the dry timber of the dead wood, the invisible beams set so high that they vaporized the material so quickly, that it wasn’t given the chance to burn. Foot by foot the timber was quickly and roughly sliced and left where it fell. The two cutters moving onto the next one. In less than a half hour, a circular area over one hundred meters in diameter had been cleared of all upright obstructions.

Above them, two Carnivore drones almost lazily orbited the area, extending the shuttle’s sensors by over a thousand times, as they kept careful watch on the new inhabitants of the planet.

The Drasin, as Milla insisted on calling them, appeared to be much like drones from an ant colony back on Earth, Brinks noted once again as he watched the surveillance information, while the shuttle hovered on its Cee-Emm assisted jets.

They appeared to be dismantling a population center, about a hundred and fifty kilometers north of the shuttle’s location, much the same way Milla reported they had in the previous system they had conquered, but with far fewer numbers.

Major Brinks had the drones make an estimate on the visible drones and shunted the information to the shuttle’s computer for comparison to the previous data. It would probably be useful, he decided, to see how they work from an earlier point.

He puzzled slightly over the signals he was getting though, because they weren’t registering as living beings, according to the software he was using. This explained why they didn’t show up on their long range sensors of course, but didn’t help him much in trying to determine what they were.

Living beings had certain side effects on their environment that could be measured from a distance. It wasn’t an exact science unfortunately, but it was the best they could do. A laser, for example, could be reflected off the atmosphere and return a chemical analysis of the planet to the long range sensors.

Certain concentrations were a good indication of life.

Carbon dioxide for one was a common by-product of living beings, at least from Earth’s history. So one could look at the CO2 levels in the atmosphere and use it to make a guess. Levels within certain parameters may mean life signs, especially when corroborated with other sensor returns, like a certain oxygen content, and even signs of certain pollutants. If the CO2 range was ridiculously high or low, it was a probably sign that life wasn’t present.

At least that’s how the Odyssey’s current life-science programs were developed.

Unfortunately, it was rapidly becoming obvious that they weren’t quite up to the task of looking for non-human life.

This world, for example, was throwing almost all the readings off the scale. The CO2 readings were on the low side, though close enough to be within limits, especially if the world were a sparsely populated agrarian world, as Milla had suggested. However the O2 levels were rapidly dropping, and the resultant chemical shift in the atmosphere was red-shifting a lot of his readings.

The Insect things, Drasin, didn’t even register until the Carnivore Drones got close enough to detect motion. This meant that they weren’t built like humans at all.

This, in turn, meant that the Major was going to have to get on the Life-Sciences lab boys butts, to turn out a new program that DID read the little insect buggers.

More work,
he grumbled wryly to himself, as he watched the drones gather in all the data they could.

For the moment, though, all he cared about was that they were a long distance away from where he and this team were.