She adjusted her pack one more time, anxious for a chance to find a secure position to break it apart and redistribute the contents to the various mounting points on her armor. She picked herself up enough to look over the wrecked capsule and survey the jungle. Her helmet’s light amplification made the scene almost as bright as a Vitalian day, while the superimposed thermographic indicators showed nothing large enough to be a threat to her, only some smaller mammals.
Elsa climbed out of the trench and turned around a few times to take in the scenery. She figured if she followed the trench the screamer had dug she’d be headed in the right direction. Both her internal compass and the one built into her helmet were failing her. “Guess that’s why they don’t let Marines with cybernetics on the FIST teams,” she mused aloud.
Elsa’s specialty was terrestrial insertions, but Vitalis at night was a different world from anything she’d been prepared for. Even a training stint in the rare protected jungle plots in Africa couldn’t have prepared her for the raw menace of the jungle around her. The trees had trunks often wider than she was tall. Even though she was only 5’6”, they seemed huge. She saw plants that looked both succulent and dangerous, though the flowers were closed at night. Some even seemed to recoil as she neared them, as though they could sense her. She smirked at the prospect, but moved on quickly after suppressing a shiver that she was alone in an alien place.
Elsa felt the same soreness in her back that had plagued her for the last three screamer trips. She owed that to a rough landing followed by catching the tail end of a blown up aeroskimmer. Her armor had been compromised and her spine broken, but there was virtually nothing technology couldn’t overcome. Modern medicine could fix the damage, but the pains stayed longer as she got older.
She emerged into a small clearing. A river, easily two dozen feet across, crossed her path diagonally. The trench from the capsule had disappeared several minutes ago. She stayed hidden amongst some massive roots that created a small shelter under one of the mega-oaks. She smirked, wondering at the size of the acorns they might drop in the fall. If Vitalis had a fall, she couldn’t remember reading about the seasons of the planet.
The water moved smooth and swift but didn’t seem violent. She frowned and wished her vision extended beneath it. It would be easy enough to look under the surface, but she doubted the water was crystal clear — it was running too quickly for that. Instead she looked up, hoping for some sign of air support or a sign of what it was that had knocked her off course in the first place.
Dark shapes flitted across the nighttime sky, obscuring the stars in patches. She frowned and subvocalized commands to zoom in so she might get a better look at them. A gasp escaped her lips as she realized they were birds of some sort. Her rangefinder and their relative size combined to form an icy lump in the pit of her stomach — many were larger than her screamer!
“ Indigenous life forms,” she whispered, sinking back behind the tree. They were nocturnal hunters. She racked her memory for more details of the native life of Vitalis. She’d been focusing on the human need to explore Vitalis for potential medicinal and rejuvenative purposes. Her job had always involved people fighting people, exogenous life forms seldom, if ever, came into the picture. The simple fact was that humanity hadn’t run across much in the way of alien life. What had been encountered was fungus, bacteria, barely developed plant life, or a few species of very aquatic invertebrates. Vitalis had offered the first fully developed ecosystem not originating from Earth.
And the life, she now began to recall, was massive. Vitalis had been likened to a pristine Earth from millions of years ago, complete with enormous creatures not so dissimilar from Earth’s dinosaurs.
Elsa turned to stare at the winged beasts flying through the sky again. “Aw fuck,” she muttered, noticing for the first time the dark line that stretched across the sky below the birds. A quick check of her suits limited sensors confirmed that it was a cliff and it was nearly three hundred yards high. Her capsule had missed it, but that meant she was even further off course than she’d first estimated.
Chapter 3
She slipped back into the shadows beneath the roots of the tree. Environmentally contained suit of armor or not, she’d been sweating for a while and she needed a moment to rest. She decided to take the opportunity to slip off her pack and start breaking it down into smaller attachable portions. It distributed the one hundred and twenty pound load more evenly across her body and gave her a chance to take a drink from one of the water nodules it contained.
Breaking protocol and better judgment, Elsa also broke the seal on her viewport and pulled the transparent metal out of the way. The humid jungle air assaulted her, causing fresh beads of sweat to spring up on her face. In spite of the wet heat the fresh air smelled good. Not just good, it was incredible. She inhaled deeply and looked around, the helmet no longer amplifying the ambient light. Her own eyes, genetically modified to better than perfect day or night vision, paled in comparison. Even without the enhancements of technology she marveled at the raw power she felt being surrounded by nature.
Ruining an otherwise surreal moment she heard a rumbling noise that rose to a crescendo. It wasn’t nearly as distant as she’d have liked, considering it had come from the direction that her screamer pod was located. She’d never heard anything like it before, but deep in her belly she knew what it was. The sweat on her skin, once sticky and uncomfortable, now felt like ice.
Else snapped her visor down and reactivated her radio transmitter before the echoes of the monstrous roar had faded. “FIST team three, report in!” Her only answer was the rapid breathing in her own helmet.
“ Get it together Gunny,” she whispered to calm herself. Without fear of her words being heard over the radio she loosened up her discipline. With the visor down there was little chance of her being heard outside her helmet. The smart armor encased her completely, providing protection from environmental, biological, and even limited nuclear threats. She wasn’t worried about physical threats either — the armor could handle just about any civilian energy weapon. Anything else, from a ballistic weapon to an ion or plasma burst, would either be too low powered to harm her or big enough to tear her apart.
She was a Marine and that meant either something couldn’t kill her or she’d be dead without a moment to suffer, why stress it? A giant animal hunting her down and tearing her apart one limb at a time, on the other hand, was something she’d never considered before.
Elsa broke from her cover and moved the remaining seven yards to the river’s edge. She tracked a stick floating in it, her suit calculating the current at roughly two feet per second. Elsa broke her rifle down in smooth practiced motions, securing the two pieces to firm points on her armor. She walked into the water, holding her breath subconsciously as the bottom fell away quickly.
Else found herself struggling against the current almost immediately. Beneath the surface it ran swifter, tugging at her and trying to send her downstream. She fought it, putting one foot after another into the rocky river bed. The armor had air enough for half an hour of moderate activity, more had she brought some of the modular oxygen tanks. Vitalis had an atmosphere that was ideal for human consumption — they’d all assumed there’d been no need for spare oxygen. Else bit back the curse muttered by deployed soldiers since the beginning of time — never enough supplies in the field.
She changed her display mode to a mixture of sonar and thermographic, mapping out the river bed and looking for potential hot spots. The water registered at a surprising eighty seven degrees Fahrenheit. Even at night it was warm enough to use as bathwater. She was trying to adjust her display to modify the thermal gradients when something bumped into her from behind.
Else jerked around, catching the blurred image of something swimming around her. She kept twisting, cursing the current for her slowness. On a hunch she counter-spun, rotating back around and catching what seemed to be a large fish coming at her. It struck, teeth scraping against her armored belly and sending her off balance. The current finished the job, knocking her off her feet and sending her rolling and floating over a dozen feet downstream before she was able to stop herself.
She looked up from her supine position and saw the carnivorous fish coming after her again. It was longer than she was tall and for the first time she wished the sensors in her helmet weren’t state of the art. She could make out teeth that would have made a Terran shark envious.
Elsa climbed to her feet, pulling out her V-Bar combat knife as she did so. Distracted by the current, the fish, and the adrenaline bursting through her veins she didn’t notice the faint humming that the powered up knife
