Hell Off-World

Under the beaming suns, all five of the Comet’s crew members made their way towards the centre of the alien city. At the chilling realisation that some tentacle-covered marauder has slithered into their brains, the notion that they should get off the planet as soon as possible had made its way around the table, but Theresa had declined it. There wouldn’t be an Ark in the system or another eleven days, and the Comet’s life support would barely preserve them in the vacuum of space for one. There was also the option to travel to another planet or moon in the system with an atmosphere, but, since they weren’t yet in any danger, Theresa had decided to stay put, so they could continue their incredibly lucrative work. For obvious reasons, Theresa had issued a curfew for the crew, and mandated medication be taken to ensure they were all soundly asleep when the suns were down.

Today, Blaine had gotten his wish of driving the Tank. The mighty exosuit trod slowly behind the rest of the crew as they took in the surrounding ruins.

“Atlas, it just occurred to me that you’ve been surveying the other crews on the planet.” Theresa said. “Have they been having similar difficulties to us?”

“Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to listen in on their every word. I’ve allocated most of my processing power to preparing to translate the native language, and more recently, remaining alive, so I’ve simply run a programme to alert me to certain keywords such as ‘alien city’.” Atlas replied. “I’ll check now.” The android was silent for barely a second. “Both crews saw the creature after the suns set on their location. The crew of the Star Skipper survived by staying close together and firing at the creature on sight, as such, their ship has sustained repairable damage. They are yet to realise that the creature has no physical presence. The crew of the Wyvern are divided. Three of their numbers have been locked in the brig after attacking their fellow crew, much as we did, except they stand by their actions, claiming that their crewmates are conspiring against them. The ship computer doesn’t have psychological profiles of them, so I can’t say if they are behaving abnormally under the planet’s influence or not.”

“Okay, thanks Atlas. Prioritise surveillance and let me know if there’s any change.” Theresa ordered.

“Do you think maybe we should try and help them?” Amy asked, unsure of the answer herself. “I mean, sounds like they might kill each other.”

“The hallucinations are making them paranoid. The last thing they need right now is to find out that we’ve been spying on them.” Theresa reasoned.

The quintet arrived at the closest spire. As it had appeared from a distance, the spire was made of an artificially smelted metal, the small spaces between the panels were full of dirt and foliage. The crew strained their necks looking up, the spire towered high into the air above them. Making their way around its vast base, it wasn’t long until they found an entry point, not that it did them much good. Once upon a time, it seemed the locals had entered the spire my means of a vast, semi-circular doorway, which mechanically rose and fell, but from the look of the vast entrance, the space the door would otherwise occupy had an entire ecosystem of plants and fungi growing in it, and its joints played host to at least three different flavours of rust.

“This is... troubling.” Monty signed.

“But not unexpected. Blaine, take to the sky and get me a full scan of this thing, we might have another way in. You three, look at this thing and see if there’s any hope of opening it even a crack.” Theresa commanded.

With a whir of gears and a blast of blue flames, Blaine lifted the Tank into the air, and cast several dozen laser sensors on the dilapidated metal. Monty, Amy and Atlas reprised their analysis of the safe from the previous day. Mercifully, it seemed the door was made of much softer metal, and, with the Tank, a hole big enough for a pedestrian could be made in just under half an hour.

“Yesterday it seemed like all of these smaller buildings were residences.” Amy caught Theresa up. “So I reckon the whole community was run inside these things.”

Theresa nodded. “Yeah, the Empire does it all the time when they’re colonising new land. A whole community gets lowered from orbit, and homes get built outwards as the society expands. I mean, once it gets big enough, they’d have to build more public buildings at ground level, but a society could look a lot like this for hundreds of years. Could mean that this planet wasn’t the natives’ first home.”

Moments later, Blaine’s voice sounded over the crew’s headsets. “There’s some kind of maintenance catwalk on the North East East side of the spire, seems like a plain old door we could break into.”

“Too small for the Tank?” Theresa guessed.

“Yup, see you on the ground.”

The crew made their way around the base of the spire, several minutes later, meeting Blaine, waiting by the powered down vehicle. At his direction, they looked up, to just barely see a metal catwalk extend from the surface of the spire.

“Okay everyone, climbing ropes at the ready.”

At Theresa’s instruction, the crew had each brought a set of standard mountaineering equipment from the Comet, part of which was a fifty-second century rope launcher, resembling a small pistol. Five devices were aimed upwards, and, when fired, launched a small blue pod on the end of a sturdy cable with the width of a thread. The pods sailed through the sky like tiny fish, at Theresa’s electronic command, and eventually reached the catwalk, where, on contact with the spire, they deployed outwards and latched on with powerful electromagnets.

Each cable was attached to a small but powerful pulley on a crew member’s belt.

“Getting lifted up by slow old pulleys eh?” Amy joked. “I remember those days...” She extended an elbow to Atlas. “Going my way, gorgeous?”

Appreciating Amy’s humour despite being unable to show it, Atlas braced themself on Amy’s shoulders, before they were both launched up the cables on her propulsion boots. Without the guidance of the cable, Amy would lose balance and spiral to the ground, meaning she was in a rare position where the gadgets were actually useful.

“Be careful up there!” The slowly ascending captain called, over the comms. “Don’t go too far until we’re all up there!”

Amy and Atlas looked around in awe at the rapidly expanding view around them. The city shrank beneath them, surrounded by the crimson fields, and the oceans and mountains beyond them. It wasn’t long before they could see the menacing pterodactyl-like creatures, soaring beneath them, prompting Amy to remind herself where her defensive stun device was, but the aerial reptiles didn’t seem to pay her any attention.

After almost three minutes of rapid ascent, Amy and Atlas very carefully put their weight on the rusty catwalk. Just as Blaine had said, the door posed little challenge to Amy’s handheld laser cutter, and with a kick and a screeching of rusty joints, the door eased open, allowing the two to gain entrance.

In an outcome which could have been predicted, but unfortunately hadn’t been, the interior of the spire was pitch black, but with Amy’s visor and Atlas’ flawless cameras, they were afforded some short-range vision. They were standing on what felt like the same sturdy metal as the spire’s exterior, in a spacious corridor with rooms with wide open window panes stretching back into the darkness. The layout was very similar to one of the fancier shopping centres on Ark-1847, giving credit to Amy’s theory about the planet’s society.

As they began to step down the corridor, Amy immediately tripped and fell forwards.

“Ow!” She complained, irritably.

Turning around, she saw she had tripped on what looked like a thick tree root. It had very little texture, which had made it difficult to see with night vision. Amy poked it with her foot in annoyance, but her spine trembled as she realised how much she had miscalculated its consistency. She hadn’t noticed when tripping over it, but the root felt less like wood and more like the flesh on a particularly flabby arm.

Confusion gave way to curiosity, which prompted Amy to engage her visor’s heat vision. True to her suspicion, the fleshy root was giving off body heat, even more than she was. As it turned out, Atlas had had the same idea, and both followed the trail of the root towards the middle of the spire, past several more of what the pair assumed had once been places of business, and towards the spire’s centre which, it turned out, was a massive space, reaching almost from the top to the bottom of the building. It seemed like it was designed to be vacant, but it certainly wasn't any more...

Cradled by hundreds, if not thousands of the fleshy tendrils, was a vast cocoon of flesh. It was impossible to tell what it looked like, since it was too far away to be seen on any camera except heat vision, but it was massive, easily the size of an Imperial transport freighter, which were built to temporarily house up to 200 people. And it gave off so much heat that it was a blinding white glare.

“What the hell is that!?” Amy whispered, daunted by the thing, but realistically assured that it couldn’t hear her.

“Whatever it is, it’s alive, and its generating heat somehow...” Atlas replied.

“It would have to be taking in a massive amount of energy. How’s it doing that from in here? Not from the suns, and it’s not connected to the ground, and even if it were, we’re in the middle of the city! Not exactly fertile soil...”

“I think we should wait for the Captain...” Atlas said, quietly.

As always, Atlas spoke wisely, but a curiosity built in Amy that was hard for her to resist indulging. She reached out for the place where one of the tendrils left the ground and reached up to the cocoon.

“Amy...” Atlas hissed accusingly.

“Oh, come on...” Amy pleaded, advertising both her eagerness to proceed, and her acceptance that not doing so might be a good idea. “I wanna know if it can react!”

“And what if it ‘reacts’ by killing you?”

“It’s a cocoon Atlas! They’re not famed for their ferocity!”

“They’re not famed for being the size of an asteroid either!”

Mercifully, Amy was interrupted before she put herself in potential danger.

“Amy? Atlas?” Theresa’s voice came from the door they had entered through.

“Over here!” Amy called back. “Use heat vision!”

Night and heat vision goggles were a part of the gear the crew had with them, unlike Amy’s visor though, the goggles didn’t do much else. As the rest of the crew arrived, there were several mumbled variations of ‘oh my god’, as their discovery was shared.

“Okay, let’s not get distracted.” Theresa concluded, after a few seconds of staring. “We can’t keep wasting time trying to understand every bizarre thing on this crazy planet. Everyone fan out and start gathering data on whatever you can find. Atlas, keep an eye out for any alien text you can translate. And let’s investigate this thing.” She cocked her head towards the cocoon. “But try not to touch these tendrils, and definitely don’t touch the cocoon.”

As per Theresa’s instructions, the crew split up, investigating the interior of the spire. Atlas investigated the many places of business. Although the interior was far better preserved than the world outside, the android had no luck finding anything that could be an example of written text. They were, however, able to identify many rooms, by their intact furniture and equipment. In one building, they found rusted syringes and scalpels, and other medical equipment, most very reminiscent of those used in the Empire, and others, the purpose of which the android could scarcely guess. In another room, they found several large basins, with drains leading from them, making them resemble baths. It seemed like these could be for some luxury service, like a spa, or a necessity for the locals’ daily lives, like public toilets.

On a higher level, Monty found several small gaps in the spire’s shell. At first, he thought they were simply caused by natural erosion, until he noticed how specific and circular they were, clearly the result of some burrowing creature. He turned around and almost immediately saw one, followed by another, and so on until he wondered how he had ever failed to notice that he was surrounded by four-legged, six inch long beetle-like creatures. Although they were obviously passive, Monty was repulsed by their appearance and numbers, and cautiously retreated the way he had come.

Theresa had fired her grapple the remainder of the distance to the spire’s ceiling, and, taking care not to touch any of its tendrils, she had pulled herself up so she was mere feet away from the enormous cocoon. Engaging the torch on the side of her headset, Theresa grimaced at the thing’s up close appearance. It looked like a heart which had been pulled out of some gigantic animal just minutes ago. It might have just been its glossy texture, but it even seemed to be oozing blood. No matter how brightly she shone her light or adjusted her heat vision, Theresa was unable to see the creature which was presumably gestating inside.

Blaine and Amy had non-verbally elected to stick together. Amy still felt guilty for attacking Blaine last night and, even though she doubted she’d have the opportunity or the ability to bail him out of a fight, she still couldn’t help but feel protective in the sinister place. The pair made their way downwards, towards the base of the spire. Before it became the nesting ground for some colossal creature, the spire seemed to have had a spacious, brightly lit foyer. Stairs led upwards in various directions, and flat, raised platforms that had probably been seats surrounded large planters. In recent days, the area had taken a more sinister turn. The tendrils reached down and covered the space like a gigantic web. Most of them branched out several feet above the ground, creating tall triangular gateways.

As Amy and Blaine descended a set of stairs and set foot on the eerie scene, Blaine cast his light over the nearest triangle of flesh, revealing something that had been invisible on heat and night vision. Within the flesh gateway, was a flowing, translucent field, like a sheet of very fine silk.

“Some kind of... membrane...?” Amy suggested, doubtfully, as they approached.

“Don’t...” They both said, in unison, turning to each other.

“Touch it...”

“Yeah, let’s not.”

“Obviously...”

As an alternative, Amy pulled a six inch long pole from her belt which, at the touch of a button, extended to four feet in an instant. She had built it from scratch and given it magnetic and stun capabilities, but the primary purpose it had been designed for was poking strange things.

She held the stick horizontally and eased it forwards. Whatever she was expecting to happen, it couldn’t be further than what actually did. As soon as the pole entered the gateway, the surrounding membrane took on an orange glow, which made it difficult to see what was on the other side, but not impossible. Blaine dashed around to the other side of the tendrils and gaped.

“It’s not here!” He remarked in disbelief, waving his hand where the stick should logically be.

Amy pulled the stick out again, to confirm it wasn’t simply disintegrating somehow, but sure enough, the truth was even more surreal. The pole simply vanished into the gateway, and then returned again. Amy directed the stick at the ground and tried to determine the texture, on the other side of what could only now be described as a portal.

“What can you feel?” Blaine asked, seeing what she was doing.

“Feels like stone... or maybe course dirt...” Amy mumbled.

Amy immediately formulated a better idea, now that she knew what she was dealing with. She pulled her grapple gun from her belt and poised it at the portal. With a few taps on touchscreens, The feed from the grapple drone’s small eye was transmitted on Blaine’s data pad and Amy’s visor. With the pull of a trigger, the tiny drone sailed from its gun and into the portal, trailing its cable behind it.

On the other side of the portal, was a barren, red landscape, reminding Amy and Blaine of what little they remembered about Mars from their history classes in school. As Amy flew the drone back and forth in various directions, it began to dawn on her that she was looking at the exact same landscape as beyond the spire on their side of the portal, there were even three suns in the sky, although they were considerably larger and redder, which, as everyone knew, meant they were considerably older and closer to death. Amy had only just registered that there were animals on the other side of the portal, when the feed distorted, and was replaced by static.

Amy lifted her visor, disorientated as her eyes focussed on her real-life surroundings. It took her a while to register a buzzing, whirring sound, and a second longer to realise what it was. The sound was coming from her belt, and it was the rapid unwinding of her winch as the drone was pulled further and further from the portal. Dread hit the two young crew members like a ton of bricks as they realised what was about to happen. Amy scrambled at the release mechanism, while Blaine drew his survival knife to cut the cable with equal urgency, as it turned out, neither of them could have had much worse timing.

The winch clicked, and Amy barely had time to utter a profanity before she was dragged off her feet and into the portal. Blaine, however, had already begun his knife’s descent towards the cable when it ran out, and Amy was dragged right into his blade, gaining a deep, but non-lethal gash in her side.

Amy soared through the portal and was immediately hit with a cold chill, which, much like the pain in her side, she had little time to deal with, in favour of the higher priority which was avoiding losing her face on the red stone beneath her, which was blurring past. As she descended, Amy engaged her propulsion boots and shot carelessly upwards, buying her a few precious seconds which, even though she was spiralling through the air in an alternate dimension, Amy was able to use to detach the cable on her winch.

Luckily, Amy landed on her feet, but since she was already travelling at dizzying speeds, she went on to fall forwards and roll painfully, down a rocky hill, slamming into the unyielding surface a dozen times, on virtually every part of her body. After coming to a stop, Amy took a moment to do a mental damage report. She was bruised all over, annoying and painful, but not life-threatening, potentially unlike the gash in her side, which had painted a considerable portion of her shirt dark red. She reasoned she should probably do something about that before she bled to death.

Before she could consider her medical options, Amy realised that her highest priority should be identifying what had dragged her through the portal. With a hand pressed firmly on her wound, she looked in the direction she had been flying, she found the cable she had just rid herself of, and at the end of it, was a nightmare.

At first glance, it resembled the ostrich creatures from the dimension she had just left, but it was decidedly more sinister. Like some zombie parallel of the other life form, it had no feathers, and its flesh was torn and damaged, even giving way all together in some places, showing nothing but bone. Its terrifying face presented a spectrum of the conditions the rest of its body was in. One side was exposed skull with a pinprick of yellow shining from an otherwise black eye socket, while on the other, a green, almost reptilian eye stared towards a meal much more enticing than the drone it had just destroyed. Its beak had chunks missing from each side, but retained its length, making it look like a ceremonial dagger.

With a blood-curdling shriek, it began to run towards Amy, with its beak snapping open and shut in preparation. Amy tensed up, cycled through her options to extend her current five second life expectancy, and ultimately arrived at one. With a pulse of blue light, Amy’s boots launched her over the charging bird and she landed, rolling much more gracefully than last time, behind it. Luckily, the predator was much less graceful than Amy was, as it stumbled and fell over, trying to turn on the spot.

Just as she had during her fight with Blaine, Amy had a number of gadgets up her sleeves, both figuratively and literally, but most of them were made to stun, and, if this thing could even feel pain, then her stingers were small potatoes compared to missing half a face. Then Amy considered sensory pain. Its eye was the one perceptive body part she could see, and it had seen her from a considerable distance, so it was a safe bet that they were sensitive to bright lights.

As the creature stood up and took a step towards her, Amy drew another metal cylinder from her pocket and pointed one end at her adversary. Once engaged, the device emitted four lights, as powerful as were scientifically possible on such a small device, each one flashing at a different, but all incredibly fast frequency. She had persuaded Blaine to let her test the device on him, and he had reported seeing spots for almost a full day. The reaction was as good as Amy could have hoped. The creature cried in distress, stepped backwards and fell to the ground, closing its one eyelid and turning it to face the light, suggesting to Amy that its eye socket was somehow capable of sight too.

While the creature was stunned, Amy turned around and started to run. She knew that, even if the monster was totally blind, she probably couldn’t escape it by running, but she needed to buy as much time as possible to prepare her counter-attack. She reached up one of her sleeves and detached the battery from one of her stingers, and pulled a small, robotic gorilla from one of her pockets. Originally, it had been a desk toy, but Amy had repurposed it as a tool for distracting predators.

Behind her, Amy heard the monstrous fowl growl hungrily and climb to its feet again. With a coil of stiff wire Amy never liked to leave the ship without, for its many uses, Amy strapped the battery to the back of the gorilla. She twisted a crank on the metallic simian several times, and then pulled out and twisted a stiff switch on the back of the battery. The collective result was that the battery began beeping rapidly, and the gorilla began writhing its legs and howling loudly. Amy dropped her makeshift invention and retrained her flashing lights on the advancing bird, to aid its decision on what to eat first.

At its feet, the bird saw the small robot running back and forth and occasionally leaping into the air, and, with one decisive peck, honoured the wish Amy was repeatedly muttering under her breath, and picked it from the ground as a chicken would a seed. It seemed as though the bird was barely considering the remainder of its meal when, with a loud bang and a crackling of electronics, it slowly leaned forwards and collapsed with a crash, revealing to Amy the large crater where most of its brain must have very recently been.

Amy stood in place and hyperventilated. She was mildly aware of the smell of roasted bird brain, but the logical portion of her mind reminded her of what she had to do. Getting back to the team was one priority. She couldn’t wait to tell Blaine that she had single-handidly killed such a creature, plus, of course, she needed to escape before more hellbeasts descended on her. Looking around, she saw at least five more ostriches roaming around the rocky terrain, but they were much further away and barely even visible, and didn’t seem to have seen her. Amy also noticed the buffalo and pterodactyl creatures from the other dimension, in similar states of decay.

Before trying to return to her team, Amy decided to address her other concern. She shrugged off her leather jacket and shirt and inspected her wound. Although the surrounding skin was bruised from her fall down the hill, the knife wound she had sustained was clean, and hopefully would be nothing that a few stitches and disinfectant from the ship wouldn’t fix. She wasn’t sure what possible contaminants existed on Planet A1948-Omicron in her own dimension. With her bare hands, Amy tore her shirt into a long, thick ribbon, and tied the remaining fabric tightly to her wound. Then, she put her jacket back on and did it up to guard against the cold.

Turning to the point where she had arrived, Amy saw what looked like a withered tree that had lived to be hundreds of years old, and died within the last ten. Spaced around it, and (Amy guessed) perfectly parallel with the portals in the spire, were wooden archways, reaching up from the ground, around the tree’s trunk. It finally occurred to Amy to try and make contact with the team.

“Hey guys?” She called into her headset, but no reply came.

She engaged the test function, which sent a signal to any receiving devices and then returned it to her, but none were found. It seemed wireless signals couldn’t traverse the portals, unlike the controls to the drone, which had a wired connection with its winch. Amy felt a flutter of anxiety when she realised that no one had come looking for her.

There had been a time when the crew was analysing a barren mineral planet, when a thin sheet of rock had given way beneath Monty, sending him plummeting into the cavernous abyss below, and Theresa hadn’t hesitated for a second before diving after the Vampire and saving them both with her grapple. What could it mean for the accessibility of the portals if no one had come to rescue her?

Approaching the one of the wooden portals, Amy was too nervous to simply step through again. For one thing, the veil in the gateway was much more transparent. She carried out her test with her stick again, with much less luck, she couldn’t feel anything on the other side of the portal now, which was deeply unsettling.

As Amy was considering her options, she heard a feeble but loud cry from behind her, where the ostrich lay dead. Her first thought was that the creatures mated for life, and a mate was currently mourning Amy’s victim, but as she turned around, her spine tingled. The monster with the hole in its head was shakily rising to its feet. Amy’s mouth hung open as though her new plan of attack was to swallow the beast whole. Assuming the creature’s recovery would soon progress to it being able to run again, Amy would have no chance of escaping it, and although she still had another stinger battery, she didn’t have another distraction machine, and even if she did, that clearly didn’t work the first time. So far as she saw it, that left her with one option.

As the predatory fowl began to run in her direction, Amy spun around and charged through the portal for a second time.