Hell Off-World

Ship time was late morning when the Ark-1847 hung in orbit of A1948′s triple suns. As was typical behavior for all regulation-run Arks, visiting ships would disembark to their respective planets, and the Ark would re-enter hyperspace mere hours after arriving. Within a month, but often sooner, another Ark would enter the system, ready to transport the visiting environmental analysts back to Imperial space.

Amidst the dozens of small ships in Ark-1847′s landing bay, was a small black ship, with faded red and orange decals. Three hundred years ago, it had been an Imperial shuttle, designed to transport small numbers of people between the planets of a solar system for a fee. Eventually its technology became redundant and it was scrapped. From there, it was salvaged and, after twelve different owners and hundreds of upgrades and modifications, it was scarcely recognizable. In some of the more strictly governed regions of the galaxy, it wasn’t even legal.

Recently, its name had become The Black Comet, and it was the proud possession of Captain Theresa Constantine. Before boarding, the crew had severed their ties with the mobile citadel, bidding farewell to their newfound acquaintances, gathering their belongings, and ensuring they had the equipment they needed for the task ahead, including a month’s supply of food and medication.

In the cockpit, the crew were gathered, either to perform their respective duties, or to excitedly watch the rise of an untouched planet, which, reluctantly or not, was something they all found breathtaking. Atlas had shed their aesthetic skin, revealing their metallic endoskeleton underneath. In place of a face, the android had a smooth visor of dense glass, shielding their CPU, a voice box and a pair of high-power cameras.

In addition to Amy, Atlas and the Constantines, the Comet’s fifth crewmate was the vampire, Monty Chrallz. In his early thirties, he was tall and slender, with the ghostly complexion that was common for his species, and slick, black hair which clung to his scalp like a second skin. Monty was the ship’s engineer. While Atlas and Amy were experts when it came to software glitches or machinery repair, Monty was an expert when it came to the heavy machinery that kept the Comet flying.

Like many of his species, Monty was reclusive. Despite there being spare rooms on the ship, he lived in the engine room, where the temperature could be kept low for both his and the massive engine’s benefit. He spent most of his time in there, reading from an extensive list of romance novels on his data pad, and rarely talking to the rest of the crew, even though he was perfectly able to, with a wrist mounted device which translated his sign language. Today though, Monty stood at the back of the engine room, with his arms folded, silently watching the rest of the crew work.

“Doors opening in sixty seconds.” A robotic voice announced, across the hanger.

In a disappointing contradiction of twenty-first century science fiction, there was no such device as an energy field, which could seal air into a ship, while still allowing the passage of solid objects. As such, the Ark’s entire hangar was one vast airlock. At a moment scheduled days in advance, the hangar would be sealed from the rest of the ship, and the panels spanning the length of the room would lower, at which point, crews, ready in their ships, could release their magnetic clamps and bid the Ark farewell.

“Doors opening in Five... Four... Three... Two... One...”

The metallic grinding of the doors could be heard from the hangar, followed by rushing air, followed by silence. Theresa and Blaine, sitting at the twin pilot consoles, lifted the ship and flew it into open space. Like a gigantic, glowing tree, the blue and red slipstreams from over a dozen ships emerged from the ark and branched off in different directions. Excluding the suns, there were twenty-eight celestial bodies in Solar System A1948, and six of them had breathable atmospheres. Although environmental analysts were perfectly capable of carrying out surveys in space suits, the challenge rarely meant locating rarer minerals and, by extension, greater pay, making them unnecessary risks and usages of oxygen.

“Looks like we’ve got two other ships heading to the Omicron planet...” Theresa noted, adjusting the sensors on her console. “Are you going to be civil, or should I cut your comms now?” She shot Blaine a deadly serious look.

On their last mission, they had been in a similar situation when leaving the Ark, and Blaine had gotten into a heated row with another Greywolf pilot, when it seemed like they were planning to land in a similar location, which would have threatened to dramatically reduce the value of whichever crew’s report made it back to the Empire second. The row had gotten more intense until, were it not for a virus Atlas had uploaded to the other ship’s targeting systems, the Comet could well have been blasted out of the sky. Once they were in the clear, Theresa had screamed her lungs out at Blaine, and confined him to his cabin for the remainder of the mission. Blaine had spent the following month on the Ark working hard for his mother’s forgiveness, and ultimately persuading her to allow him to continue his role as her co-pilot, on the understanding that he wouldn’t get another chance.

Blaine pursed his lips and exhaled audibly, while looking dead ahead, avoiding his mother’s steely glare. With a few taps on his control panel, he targeted the other two ships and opened comms.

“Calling RG Wyvern and... Star Skipper...” He looked around the cockpit and mouthed ‘seriously?’ eliciting a smirk from Amy. “Looks like we’re all headed to Omicron, how about we draw some random co-ordinates and make sure we stay out of each other’s way?”

Theresa smiled and gave Blaine a thumbs up, but Blaine’s expression was still serious. Their previous confrontation had begun in a similar way. After several seconds, the ships’ names on the dashboard lit up, indicating an incoming response.

“Sounds good.”

“Syncing now.”

The three ship computers connected and generated three sets of co-ordinates, each in a different region of the planet, and distributed them unbiasedly. While the other two ships could be seen flying around the planet, the Constantines lowered the ship towards Omicron’s atmosphere. The streaks of fire across the ship’s windows never failed to exhilarate Amy, Theresa and Blaine. Atlas, although capable of excitement, was adjusted to the sight, having seen it many times before, and Monty merely frowned uncomfortably and shielded his eyes.

From orbit, the planet had appeared to be barren and lifeless, since most lifeforms in the galaxy associated vegetation with the colour green, due to the near universal production of chlorophyll in all plant life, as the atmospheric burn faded, though, that was revealed to be far from the case. Flying gradually lower, the Comet soared over fields of red grass as far as the eye could see. Spaced around in massive clusters, were groups of black and purple trees, reaching high into the air, surrounded by brambles and flowers of every colour imaginable.

Grazing on the grass, were small herds of creatures resembling buffalo, with four horns and muscular legs, which bent outwards, horizontally. In the sky, enormous reptiles, like pterodactyls with a second pair of wings emerging from their feet, gracefully soared, and darting through the grass at incredible speeds, were enormous birds with long necks and scaly, clawed hands.

As the crew watched in awe, one of the birds darted towards one of the smaller buffalo creatures, which had wandered away from its pack, and leapt at it, digging all four sets of claws into it as the two of them rolled across the ground, and seconds later, it impaled the herbivore with its menacing beak. As the other buffalo seemed to roar in distress, and charge towards the predator, the bird violently tore its prey to shreds, filled its arms with as much as it could carry, and darted across the grass in a blur.

“Developed life!” Theresa commentated. “Jackpot!”

Planets with such rich ecosystems were goldmines for environmental analysts. There was little the Imperial government would pay for more than the discovery of such advanced, new alien species.

“We’ll want to be careful of those bird things. Amy, calibrate the ship’s sonic repulsors, Atlas, Monty, go prep the...”

As Theresa spoke, Monty began to walk towards the front of the cockpit, staring, mesmerized, into the distance. The rest of the crew stared at him, bemused by his unusual behaviour of straying into the centre of a room. When he realised the rest of the crew were looking at him, instead of what had caught his attention, he pointed at the window and snapped his fingers several times. With his other hand, he desperately signed the word “Look!”

Four sets of jaws hung open in disbelief, and Atlas’ eye-cameras readjusted several times before they were certain they weren’t malfunctioning. Approaching on the horizon, were a series of spires, pointed at the sky. The first logical assumption was that they were rock formations, but they couldn’t be, they were far too specific in their design. The next theory that each of the crew formed was that they were the habitats of primitive local fauna, like enormous termite mounds, but the more they looked, and the closer they got, the more contradicting evidence they noticed.

The structures were made of a dense substance, like stone or rusted metal, and was decaying in ways that only a manufactured structure could. For instance, perfectly rectangular sheets were peeling from them, or had fallen off altogether, revealing open space inside. Spaced around the tips of the spires were metallic beams and dishes, as though designed to intercept and transmit radio waves. As the Comet drew closer, they realized the sheer scale of the spires, and noticed countless small buildings surrounding them.

“O... M... G...” Amy whispered.

“It’s... It’s a freaking alien civilization!” Theresa shot to her feet, to alleviate her agitation.

In the fifty-second century, encounters with intelligent races outside of the Empire was as rare, and treated as sceptically as it had been in the twenty-first. Although the Empire included thirty-four sentient species, they had originated from only fifteen different societies, and the last one to be discovered had been over 800 years ago. In fact, there were even a surprising number of simple-minded fools who genuinely believed that every sentient race in the universe was already a member of the United Galactic Empire.

“We’ll go down in history!” Monty’s translator announced.

“We’ll be filthy, freaking rich!” Theresa elaborated.

She stepped over to Blaine and aggressively hugged him, before a daunting wobble reminded her that he was the only one flying the ship. She turned her attention to Amy and Atlas, seizing Amy’s waist with one arm and heaving her off her feet with both of them in hysterics, and pulling Atlas into a playful headlock with her other. Monty returned defensively to the wall and rolled his eyes, with a slight smile on his face.

As Theresa began to calm down, she let go of Atlas’ head. “Okay, Atlas...” She began, sounding like she had a set of instructions prepared, but Atlas had pre-empted them.

“I’ve scanned the planet for radio waves on multiple frequencies. There’s some slight interference, but It’s too erratic to be deliberate. I can say with some certainty that there is no civilized life on this planet.”

If anything, that was even better news. The number of dead alien civilizations found by space pioneers could be counted on one hand.

“Good job, and what about...” Theresa continued, but again, Atlas was on the ball.

“I hacked the comms of the RG Wyvern and Star Skipper when the computers synced. Both are encountering various species of flora and fauna, but neither have found signs of sentient life.”

“Atta girl. Keep tabs on them, I want the credit for this all to ourselves.” She returned to her seat at the controls. “Alright, now... we’re all excited, but ‘not getting eaten by killer ostriches’ is still a priority, so like I was saying... Amy, sonic repulsors. Atlas and Monty, get the Tank ready to roll.”

“Yes capt’n!” The two technicians chorused.

While Atlas and Monty left through the cockpit’s sliding doors, Amy tapped the side of her visor, and an Augmented Reality control panel appeared in front of her, on which she started tapping, seeming, to the Constantines, to be wiggling her fingers at thin air. Sonic repulsors were an essential tool for any environmental analyst. It emitted a sound wave which was unbearable to anything with even a remote sense of hearing, but could be adjusted, creating a safe haven in the immediate area around the ship, without bothering the creatures beyond. All of the organic crew members had microscopic buffers injected into their ears, which negated the effect of the device without consequence, and Atlas was easily able to filter the sound out themself.

As the ship slowly touched down outside the enormous settlement, Amy swiped her hand through the air, switching her display to a bar chart of the various elements that made up the atmosphere.

“Air looks pretty good out there, we should be fine for a few days at a time, but I’ll generate some pills anyway, just to be safe.”

Towards the beginning of the space age, a revolutionary drug had been developed, which, when modified in accordance with a local atmosphere, caused a long-lasting chemical reaction in the user’s lungs, which allowed them to breathe almost any planet’s air without ill-effect. As the pilots joined Amy at the exit to the cockpit, three pills were dispensed from a receptacle on the wall. In the garage, Monty was receiving his own.

As the cockpit was vacated, Amy began running ahead. “I’m gonna leave with Atlas and the Tank! I’ll see you outside.”

Blaine looked between Amy and his mother in disbelief. “It’s my turn to drive it!” He demanded, childishly, before pursuing her to the garage.

“No it isn’t!” Amy called in a singsong voice, from down the corridor.

Theresa smirked as her younger crew ran from sight. She turned a corner and approached the ship’s boarding ramp. With a few taps on a nearby control panel, the door hissed as the airtight seal was unlocked, and the ramp slid down. She closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose as alien air hit her face. Even with fame and fortune staring her in the face, Theresa took a moment to appreciate one of her favourite parts of her job.

As she stepped down the ramp, she heard the grinding of hydraulics in need of oiling, as the garage door slid open on the other end of the ship. The garage had been created after the ship was first repurposed for exploration, so travellers could bring with them, small land vehicles, such as hoverbikes. The Black Comet’s small vehicle was significantly more impressive though.

After much hissing and stomping, the Tank came around the ship, to meet Theresa. It was an exosuit, a good twelve feet tall, with arms and legs like tree trunks and fingers that could prod holes in boulders. The entire suit was made of almost indestructible durasteel, its feet and back were mounted with powerful thrusters (and unlike Amy, it could fly for extended periods without losing its balance), and its arms hid every kind of weapon imaginable, from laser rifles, to high-powered electrical stun devices, and even a localised sonic repulsor. Altogether, the machine was almost half as valuable as the ship that carried it.

Sitting in a small cockpit in the chest, behind a sturdy, glass windshield, Atlas waved at Theresa. Amy sat cross-legged, on top of the machine, beaming happily. Blaine sulkily followed the two of them from the ship with his arms folded. A few moments later, Monty left the ship and joined them in the crimson meadow. Beneath the triple suns, Monty wore a black cloak, wrapped around his head, and a pair of sunglasses. Once they were all present, Theresa went into ‘Captain Mode.’

“Alright crew, welcome to Planet A1948-Omicron. We will be here for approximately twelve planetary rotations, after which, Ark-8263 will be entering the system to take us back to Imperial space. Once on board the Ark, we will transmit our findings to the Department of Species Registration on the Imperial Capital, at which point we will become obscenely wealthy and go down in history as the discoverers of this civilization.” Amy giggled at Theresa’s informal tone. “In the mean time, we need pictures, data, maps, relics, anything that isn’t nailed down, we scavenge, anything that is, we document. Atlas, I want you to look around for computers, see if you can decrypt any information. Amy and Monty, see if you can salvage any alien tech. Obviously, this society has been dead for a long time, but let’s keep our fingers crossed. Blaine, you’re with me, we’re gonna do our usual job and catalogue some alien life.”

Blaine looked crestfallen. “Ugh, really?”

“Really. I want to see the city too, but we’ve got work to do. Okay team, let’s get to it.”

As the Constantines made their way across the red grass, Atlas drove the tank into the city, with Monty in tow.

“View’s pretty good from up here Mont!” Amy called, from the Tank’s head. “You wanna embrace your wild side and join me?”

“I’m content, thank you.” Monty’s translator cordially replied.

There wasn’t much left of the city’s buildings. If their windows had ever contained glass, there wasn’t a shard to be seen, and many of the doors had been corroded by time and fallen from their frames. Monty walked over to the first one they approached, lying abandoned in front of its door frame, and ran his hand along its side.

“This was mechanical... There’s no joint here, the door would have slid out electronically.” He noted.

“Well yeah, we know they were technologically advance, the spire has radar dishes on it!” Amy noted.

After his inspection of the door was finished, Monty stood up and entered the building. The doorway was over ten feet high, offering an insight to the height of the native species. The inside was bare. Any contents it might have had had been lost to time and overrun with plant life, which seemed to be growing out of every crevice. It was difficult to learn anything from the structure, but Monty and Amy agreed that it had most likely been a home. It had stairs leading to upper floors, several rooms, and signs of internal plumbing.

As the trio progressed, they inspected more houses periodically, without much more luck, until their seventh house, when Amy discovered a dense, metal cube in an upstairs room.

“I think this used to be some kind of safe...” She noted, as she ran her hands over it.

At Monty’s request, Atlas had used the Tank to lift the room’s door while the vampire inspected it.

“I believe this door once locked in several places...” He noted. “Clearly the contents were of great value or secrecy.”

“Exciting!” Amy chimed.

She pulled from her pocket a metallic, pen-like device and pointed it at the cube. With the touch of a button, a thin, red beam of light emerged. Amy ran the laser up and down the surface several times, then held it in one place. After several seconds, she deactivated the beam and ran her hand over the box, pouting at the lack of damage she had done.

“Fellas, you want to give me your two credits on this?” She asked, resignedly.

With a hiss, the Tank’s visor lifted, and Atlas joined Amy and Monty at the safe, by the time they got there, Monty had placed a cuboid device against it, and was studying the stream of information it was sending to his data pad in his other hand. With a jerk of his head, he indicated for Amy to hold the device in place, so he could free his hand and speak.

“It’s an incredibly advanced alloy, made of several dense metals, essentially indestructible.”

“Essentially?”

“If we can get it to a high enough temperature, it should melt.” Atlas realised, downloading the information from Monty’s data pad.

“It would be impossible without destroying the contents, we would need a furnace.” Monty said.

“We have the next best thing.” Atlas retorted.

The android returned to the Tank and, controlling it remotely, had it lower its arm, open a compartment, and exposing its laser rifle. Atlas removed the device, while keeping it attached to the tank by a thick power cable.

“Stand back please.” Atlas requested, as they crossed the room to the safe and lifted up the weapon.

As Monty and Amy backed away nervously, Atlas fired a constant beam of red light at the safe, several inches wide, rather than the pinprick of Amy’s laser cutter. For almost five minutes, Atlas stood perfectly still, before disengaging the device, leaving a perfectly circular hole cut into the upper corner of the safe, glowing a bright red. Setting the weapon down on the ground, Atlas reached into the hole.

“I swear, if there’s something in there which is slightly wider than that hole, I’m not gonna be impressed...” Amy muttered.

Mercifully, Atlas removed their hand moments later, holding three metal bars with glass sheets on one side, revealing several layers of what looked like blue plastic within.

“Excellent, hard drives!” Atlas exclaimed. “Perfectly preserved!”

“Will you be able to read them?” Amy asked, sceptically.

Several tiny metallic threads emerged from one of Atlas fingers and, one by one, they snaked into the ports on the hard drives. “I can download the information, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to decrypt it fully until I’ve a thorough understanding of the written language. Depending on the complexity, I should be able to deduce it if I’m able to see enough of it. In the mean time, I’ll allocate some processing power into looking for patterns in the encrypted information, it should help.”

Once their download was complete, Atlas dropped two of the cores and placed the third in a backpack Amy was wearing. Returning to the Tank, Atlas led the group back into the street, and their research continued. As the day wore on, and the trio gradually made their way to the centre of the city, they made yet more discoveries about the dead civilisation.

Spaced out between the buildings, were countless of what Monty concluded had been vehicles. They were large, almost egg-shaped, and had inverted dome-like cockpits. They lacked any kind of seats, which Monty believed had always been the case, based on the texture of the surface where they might have been. Atlas went on to deduce that this could suggest the native species had been an amorphous race, such as cephalopods, since they didn’t seem to need backbone support. Either way, the size of the cockpit gave credit to the theory that the natives had been approximately ten feet tall.

Amy noticed aloud that all of the buildings they found were of a similar size and layout. None of them large enough to be public buildings such as hospitals or schools, which led her to theorise that the community’s places of business must have been in the spires, which seemed to suggest that the settlement had been built all at once, rather than having grown as the population and economy improved.

By the time the trio had approached the nearest spire, the suns were approaching the horizon and the sky had taken a purple-red hue. Amy was laying face down on top of the tank, kicking her legs playfully and studying the images they had recorded on her visor, when she received a call from Theresa. Atlas and Monty’s data pad were alerted to the call too.

“Hey Captain!” Amy called, after picking up.

“Team, I want you to start heading back.” Theresa ordered, without returning Amy’s greeting.

“What? But we just reached the spire!” Amy whined.

“That’s an order, Amy! You know the rules.”

The crew had only been on three other planets with such evolved alien life, but Theresa had always made them wait the first night out in the safety of the ship, so they could safely observe any nocturnal predators from afar. This had been proven to be smart from the first occasion, since the first such planet turned out to be home to flocks of a creature resembling griffins, which would have torn the crew apart in minutes, with or without the Tank.

The Tank had barely taken a dozen steps back towards the ship, when it stopped.

“Atlas, you okay bud?” Amy asked, sliding down the front of the machine so her upside-down face peered through the windshield.

“I’m... I’m picking something up... I think we should return to the ship as quickly as we can.” Atlas very rarely stammered or panicked, but they usually did both at the same time, so Amy shuddered. “Forgive me, Monty.”

The Tank’s hand reached down and gently lifted the Vampire off his feet. With her eyes wide in panic, Amy clung onto the pair of handles installed on top of the exosuit’s head, for this very function. With a whir of well-maintained mechanics, a pair of panels on the back of the Tank lifted diagonally, revealing its thrusters, which, moments later, roared into life, launching the vehicle off the ground with a trail of blue flames.

As the Tank soared over the abandoned city, the last traces of colour began to fade from the blackening sky. A powerful torch shone from Amy’s visor, scanning the city as they flew. Out of the corner of her eye, Amy saw Monty doing the same. After just a few seconds of flight, Amy’s heart felt like it skipped several beats. As she had shone her light at a gap between two buildings, she had seen a formless black blur which, immediately after being discovered, vanished behind cover.

“Over there!” Amy cried.

“I saw it too.” Monty retorted, but when Amy turned to him, she saw that he was looking in the other direction.

Her confusion didn’t last long, as Atlas explained. “There are heat signatures all around us, they appeared in a second!”

That alone wouldn’t have been enough to instil terror, there were countless organisms that could moderate their body heat, and many did so on daily cycles. In fact, nothing about the situation was particularly daunting, except for the fact that Atlas was scared, and Amy and Monty both knew that it took a lot to frighten someone so rational and level-headed.

As the Tank flew, its passengers remained agitated and vigilant. Amy saw more and more vague movements out of the corner of her eyes, and many more were reported by Monty. When they were close to the ship, Amy anxiously looked over her shoulder and, with a shriek, let go of one of the Tank’s handles in alarm. For a split-second, she was sure she had seen a black, wraith-like figure soaring towards them, but, after sliding down the side of the Tank and clinging on for her life, it was gone.

“Amy!” Atlas called out in alarm.

“Keep flying!”

The Comet’s garage door opened automatically as they approached, and Atlas recklessly flew the machine inside, sending it sprawling sideways across the garage floor, before commanding the door to slam shut behind them. Amy let go of the handle, and dropped, shakily to her feet, and Monty climbed out of the Tank’s fist, before removing his sunglasses and lowering his hood. Atlas followed suit by climbing out of the Tank’s cockpit.

“Okay...” Amy gasped, through laboured breaths. “Atlas... what the hell was that!?”

Before Atlas got a chance to answer, the hangar door slid open and the Constantines burst in, both with panicked expressions. Theresa was wielding duel laser pistols, and Blaine hung behind her, poising a heavy rifle. They were the standard weapons the two of them took with them to catalogue alien life, to fight off predators, the rest of the crew weren’t used to having them pointed at them, though. Amy threw her hands into the air in surrender, but Theresa and Blaine lowered their weapons immediately.

“Oh... it’s you...” Theresa sighed in relief.

“Of course it’s us!” Monty signed, exasperated. “Who were you expecting?”

Blaine and Theresa shared an anxious glance.

“What’s going on here?” Atlas asked.

Theresa opened and closed her mouth uncertainly and cocked her head. “Blaine thought he...”

Before she could finish, Blaine scowled irritably and interrupted her. “There’s someone in the ship!”