Dark Planet Read online

  “More evil than evil?” I mused.

  Before we could explore the topic further, a disturbance broke out on the bridge. Atlas’ voice rose angrily.

  “You damned ape!”

  He sprang to his feet and rushed Gorilla, knocking the black man’s book from his hands. Gorilla charged back with a primordial roar. The two big men grappled like giants, locked together in combat. They crashed to the deck, grunting and yelling, kneeing, elbowing and gouging. Fortunately, they were unable to do much damage to each other in the confined space and in the ship’s reduced gravity field.

  Captain Amalfi and little Ferret rushed to break them apart, succeeding only after Ferret had been flung into a bank of monitors and Sergeant Shiva replaced him with his greater bulk and authority.

  “What the hell is the matter with the two of you?” the Captain demanded.

  Atlas looked befuddled, like he was emerging from sleepwalking. His face was flushed and bleeding from minor scratches. Gorilla shook his bald head to clear it.

  “I-I don’t know, Captain,” he murmured.

  “Gorilla, he … he …” Atlas stammered. “Gorilla, he … looked at me.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  TWELVE

  DAY TWO

  H-Hour for insertion.

  “Suck it in, DRT-bags, it’s show time,” Sergeant Shiva announced.

  The crew donned pressurized space suits and helmets over our chameleon cammies and crawled on hands and knees, one at a time, through the airtight lock into the tiny shuttle pod and strapped ourselves into individual G-seats. Some of the seats were situated in front of the miniaturized control panel, where the Captain, as pilot, began switching toggles to start the undocking sequence. I heard a hydraulic whine. Panel lights began blinking.

  Sergeant Shiva entered last and secured the hatch before taking his place. The chamber went dark until the interior lights came on. The area was so cramped that the taller men slumped in their seats to prevent banging their helmets against the overhead, and if we moved otherwise we barked our elbows and knees against the surrounding bulkheads. We went into OPSEC silent running. Secure commo sets plugged into our helmets provided intercom.

  The craft was point-computerized for the fastest and most effective landing approach. It was designed to negotiate a low detection entry, morph into a glider configuration, dive in slow flight to the water, level out, and “control crash” into the sea where it became a submarine. All of which was computer initiated and controlled. After undocking, and until we landed in the water, passengers were mostly along for the ride, dependent upon a “pilot” constructed of microchips and electric micro energy.

  Because of our unfortunate historical roots in Indowy technology, Zentadon were less comfortable with machines and artificial intelligence than Humans. I was particularly uncomfortable with it and felt my muscles tensing and taa dripping into my system as Captain Amalfi activated the cycle that would fire the pod away from the Stealth and plunge us downward toward the Dark Planet. Keepers at the orphanage, bless their Zentadon souls, always said I had the heart of a poet. Poets were cautious of things you constructed to think for you.

  “This is going to get a bit hairy,” Captain Amalfi warned through the intercom. “Barf bags are built into your helmets. Listen to the bell. It tolls for thee.”

  He fired the pod after a final systems and safety check. It shuddered, the lights dimmed. It shot away from the Stealth like a bullet from the muzzle of a Grav rifle. There was minimal gravity at this altitude above Aldenia and no atmosphere, resulting in little discomfort for those of us strapped into the projectile. About an hour of weightlessness followed, filled with some idle chatter but mostly with quiet as we riveted our attention upon the viewscreen.

  “Piece of cake,” Atlas quipped. That was one of the grunt’s favorite lines.

  The ride really began when the pod touched the edges of Aldenia’s thick atmosphere. The “pilot” flew like it was insane. That was in case the Blobs were watching. It was programmed to execute random barrel rolls and flips and to make flaky course changes in order to simulate a meteor entering the atmosphere. It tumbled, yawed and skittered first one way, then the other, slamming us against our restraints. Heat shields armored the vessel, but the temperature inside rose anyhow to the steamed-seafood level.

  “Vomit … comet!” Ferret moaned. He sounded sick.

  Plastic wings sprouted from the landing pod once we hit good atmosphere. The viewscreen showed us flying through high storms, which gave us another good jostling. Lightning cracked and popped. A wind tunnel caught us and sent us plummeting and spinning wildly toward Aldenia. We were out of control.

  “Aeeeiiii …!” Ferret gasped.

  We struck the ocean with the impact of a can of processed vegetables dropped from the top of the Triple Trade Towers on Galaxia. Splat! I shook off a moment of unconsciousness. The craft was being tossed about like a small boat in a gale, which was precisely what it had become. A monster that resembled some kind of eel with sharpened teeth the size of pickaxes loomed so suddenly on the viewscreen that Sergeant Shiva recoiled from it with a grunt of surprise and Maid emitted a startled scream. It sank again into the sea, leaving the screen filled with savage mares’ tails whipped by ranks of demonic clouds among which lightning engaged in firefights.

  “What the hell was that?” Atlas exclaimed.

  “I think we’ve been properly welcomed,” Team Sergeant Shiva said and began a head count.

  “Captain Amalfi?”

  Captain Bell Toll gave him a look.

  “Kadar San …?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gorilla …?”

  “Uh … Whew!”

  “Atlas …?”

  “I was wrong. That was no piece of cake.”

  “Gun Maid …?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Ferret …?”

  “… sick.”

  “Blade …?”

  “Fu-uck.”

  “Very well,” Captain Amalfi acknowledged, taking over the ship from the auto pilot. “All accounted for. Crew, prepare to dive.”

  Gorilla checked his panel. “We have watertight integrity, Cap.”

  “We’re still picking up no signals, sir,” Maid reported.

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s what I said, sir.” She sounded testy. “Not even static.”

  “Very well. Dive …”

  That was as far as he got. A throaty voice whispered into the intercom, indistinct and hollow like it was belching out of the black depths of the planet itself. A shudder wracked my body. I not only heard and felt the presence, whatever it was, but an image of something otherworldly and indescribably hellish, of death and torture, perversion and brutality, flashed for an instant in my brain. I almost cried out.

  “Who said that?” Captain Amalfi asked.

  We all looked around, half-expecting something to have entered the pod with us. Something beyond the worlds any of us knew.

  A barely audible chuckle slithered through the intercom. A chuckle without humor, dry and raspy. It would have possessed scales if it were visible.

  “What’s so fuckin’ funny?” Blade challenged.

  A single explosive burst of sourceless, maniacal laughter. Then, only silence and the lingering odors of ozone and rot.

  Maid was the first to find a voice. She sounded shook. “The … the Blobs know we’re here.”

  I shivered, although the temperature in the pod must have been over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Sergeant Shiva and Ferret drew their Punch Guns.

  “That was no Blob,” Gorilla said in a low voice. “I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t sentient. It left no signature on the LF indicators. Captain, we all heard it, but there wasn’t anything here.”

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  THIRTEEN

  Maid attempted to explain it once she recovered her composure. “We’re under OPSEC. All commo is locked down. The only way I can explain it is that we m
ust have picked up a dead transmission that has been floating around space for heaven knows how long. Otherwise, I’m picking up nothing.”

  “We aren’t in space now,” Gorilla said.

  He exchanged his reentry helmet for the special combat one that fed environmental data directly into his large brain for analysis. After a moment, he reported a negative.

  “Same on the LF,” he said. “No other life form within the vicinity.”

  There simply was no room in the pod for a stowaway, and certainly no place for it to hide in such a compact environment.

  “Sergeant Kadar, your assessment?” Captain Amalfi requested through the intercom. He sounded distrustful, his misgivings unquestionably fueled by the talk he had had with Lieutenant Snork aboard the Tsutsumi. The sown seed growing.

  I had already scoured the pod and the immediate vicinity outside the ship, using my particular Talent. Whatever presence I previously sensed was no longer among us. In fact, the environment seemed scrubbed, so non-threatening that it made me even more uneasy.

  “I … Negative,” I responded.

  “Nothing?” Captain Bell Toll pressed. “Can you explain it?”

  My senses were telling me … something. Like in a language I could not quite comprehend.

  “I am as baffled as anyone,” I admitted.

  “Fu-uck,” Blade’s rough voice barged in. “Why the fuck did we even bring him along?”

  If someone removed that particular vulgarism from his speech, it would reduce his vocabulary by half.

  Captain Amalfi professionally relegated the odd event to the back of his mind since it couldn’t be explained at the moment. With cool efficiency, he punched our target coordinates into the pod-turned-submarine, checked the systems and said, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”

  Submerging, the submarine “flew” through the water within a vacuum created by its own remarkable speed, making a sound approaching that of a constant, but low-volume sonic boom. We encountered no more of the eel-shaped creatures or, at our speed, any other aqua life that showed up on the viewscreen as anything other than small, disappearing blurs.

  In spite of our meteor-like arrival and the surface storms, we had landed within a relatively short distance of our land debarkation point. Thanks to the computers. Sonar revealed a deep glacier-formed harbor and a river emptying into it. The water became darker, murky, turbulent at the river’s mouth, reducing the effectiveness of the viewscreen and forcing us to rely on the ship’s nerve center to avoid obstacles and underwater stone banks. The skipper reduced speed to a crawl. We proceeded up the river like a blind fish. My senses tingled like raw nerves.

  Captain Amalfi pulled power. “Okay, DRT-bags. We’re here. Now we go overland.”

  The craft sank to the bottom. Atlas shot core anchors into the riverbed to hold the pod securely in place and out of sight. The crew prepared in a businesslike manner to go ashore in a hostile environment. The edginess, the pre-mission jitters – whatever it was – appeared to have dissipated. The team returned to its old bantering character. Even I felt more at ease.

  Chameleon cammies were activated. They were of a remarkable lightweight material that assumed the nature of the surrounding environment. Clad in helmet, hood, and mask, you could stand in a forest and blend in perfectly with it, so that you couldn’t be seen until you moved and then it was like part of the forest moved. There were two drawbacks: their properties of camouflage lasted only a relatively short time, even with an energy source, and they precisely mirrored immediate surroundings so that when you walked next to a particular bush, you became another bush in the exact image of the first. Double vision. Atlas crouching next to Maid in the confined space of the pod powered up his cammies first, and suddenly there were two of Maid side by side. Except Atlas hadn’t donned his battle helmet and mask shield and the image he reflected was of his own blond head attached to Maid’s body. Ferret guffawed.

  “If you had a body like that all the time, big man, I’d give up Naleen for you.”

  “That prolie slut’s already given you up for the home guard, Ferret.”

  Ferret laughed. “Just so they don’t wear it out before I get back.”

  “You can’t wear those things out,” Gorilla put in, joining the banter. “I’ve tried.”

  “Is that right, Gun Maid?” Ferret leered. “What do you get, about a million miles or so out of one?”

  “Pervert.”

  I laughed, the low Zentadon purr that passed as a chuckle among my kind. Maid shot me an astonished look.

  “That’s a wonderful sound!” she exclaimed.

  “He sounds like a tomcat in heat,” Blade rumbled. “Watch out for him, Gun Maid. Next thing you know he’ll be humping your leg and trying to jump your bones. I’ll bet he’s got a tail curled up inside his crotch instead of a set of …”

  “… which I’ll neuter if I catch him sniffing around.” Atlas glowered.

  Gorilla ejected a sensor robot from a hatch in the pod’s side to swim ashore and take a look around before Captain Amalfi committed the team. The bot was an off-the-shelf design that resembled a large pill bug. It was about a foot long with a series of rapid legs that could be remotely adjusted for walking, swimming, or even climbing trees. As soon as it was free of the craft, it popped to the surface and stuck up a thin detector rod for a look-see. Huddled around the monitor inside, DRT-213 took its first close-up look at Aldenia.

  The Dark Planet was appropriately named. The river water was a black coffee color, obviously stained from tannin leeched from the forest. Above its surface, the atmosphere was dark gray and clutching, hovering like a noxious and dangerous cloud, boiling with stabs and flickers of lightning. We had landed in the middle of one of the numerous storms and it was raining. Not so much that it was raining, but that everything was rain. The river appeared at flood stage; it was probably always at flood stage.

  The gen-bot swam toward shore on the rain-churned surface, dodging flotsam hammering swiftly on the current toward the nearby sea. The monitor revealed logs and huge floating boulders bearing down upon the bot, so imminent and present on the screen that Ferret actually ducked. He grinned sheepishly.

  The bot reached shore and clambered onto solid, if not exactly dry, land.

  “Pan out for a big view,” Captain Amalfi instructed Gorilla.

  The panorama showed a small grassy clearing — the grass was black — surrounded by a forest thick with spindly, cycad-looking undergrowth and thin, twisted forest giants whose moss-crusted tops disappeared into the cloud cover. Rain and cloud scud swirled. No more forbidding place could be imagined. No wonder the planet spawned an aura of evil, even without the additional ignominy of the taa camps and experimental labs run by the old power-mad Indowy.

  “It’s like Earth before time began,” Maid breathed, staring at the monitor screen.

  “It’s not Earth in any of its stages,” Blade objected. “I was here before. It’s more like Hell.”

  The bot nosed around as it was programmed to do, scouting in a series of expanding concentric circles starting from its initial position. A half-hour passed without incident. Blade grew bored at the repetitive scenery of forest, rain, and creeper mosses writhing in the storm, and broke out his Gauss to give it a last-minute cleaning and checking.

  A bolt of lightning struck a tree with a terrific crack. The tree splintered but remained standing in several reduced renditions of itself as wind howled through them. I realized lightning was the reason why the taller trees were so thin-trunked and twisted.

  “We’re really going to get a charge out of this mission,” Ferret quipped.

  The bot moved upriver near the bank, then swung into the forest in another sweep that brought it out on the bank downriver. The monitor revealed a large flying creature soaring low above the river, apparently hunting while it ignored bolts of lightning snapping around it. Spotting the bot moving, it dropped low and circled it a number of times. They were apparently curious creatures.

  “A pt
erodactyl,” Maid breathed, awed.

  “More like a giant dragonfly,” Gorilla corrected. “The area study describes four basic forms of local fauna, the most prevalent of which are families of insect-looking creatures in varying size, color, pattern, configurations, and methods of locomotion and sustenance. Some crawl like millipedes, some fly like dragonflies, some build enormous webs and are like spiders, others walk or scurry or run. They are the largest and most dominant of the planet’s life forms.”

  Atlas grinned wryly. “Thank you, Mr. Universal Geographic.”

  “I’m not through yet. You’re going to like this. Most thrive on foliage or are scavengers, but there are also predator insects that resemble monstrous, mutated hellgrammites the size of lions and water buffalo, with lobster-like pincers and mandibles that are perfectly capable of making hors d’oeuvres of any one of us with one snap.”

  “Sounds appetizing,” Ferret commented.

  “There isn’t enough of you, Gun Maid, or the elf, to make a hors d’ oeuvre,” Blade chided.

  The second basic life form described by Gorilla was giant predator reptiles. Lizards the size of ground vehicles, toads like boulders, snakes forty feet long – all with their special adaptations to Aldenia’s environment.

  There were also fish and unknown creatures in the rivers, lakes, and oceans, one form of which we had caught a glimpse of upon splashdown.

  Finally, there were the innocuous mammals. Small, hairy, rodent-like creatures upon which the predator class apparently fed.

  We watched the view screen as the giant flying insect receded into the distance, darting and diving as dragonflies will. It was replaced, as though in illustration of Gorilla’s impromptu lecture, by a swarm of insect creatures ambling down to the river and preparing to swim across. Comparing their size to the surrounding foliage, I estimated the larger individuals to be about six meters in length and two meters in height. Their carapaces came in three parts. The rear two plates were a reddish-maroon in color, while the front section humped forward over a small shovel-like head and was darker and cream-striped.