Yul frowned. Possibly more than one organism. The trail wound off toward the flat-topped mountain much closer now. He did not get a good feeling about that place, nor the one they were heading toward. His metal fist closed tighter on his blaster.
They loped more easily in the lighter gravity than walking in full G. But it was dangerous too. One slip and one could smash his faceplate on a rock.
They approached the lip of the crater and Yul slowed, reflecting on the macabre events of the recent past. The destruction of Hresh’s research installation had probably set back cybernetics decades, but better than letting those damn butterflies rove free about the galaxy. A part of him knew that the plant pods were never meant to leave Xeses.
If he had been granted knowledge of the past, he would be appalled at the reality that Xeses and worlds like Sigren with their territorial puffballs were only one of the thousands of worlds that the ‘Masters’ had seeded aeons ago...The Masters, long vanished from the stars, that mysterious race which had created the Mentera and the Zikri in their fiendish vats in bygone days. They seeded lifeforms on worlds in the Dim Zone and beyond: the puffballs of Sigren, the Xesian plant-pod butterflies, and a thousand other species hidden away on remote worlds, far from human eyes. Even they could not have envisaged the strange, exotic and brutal universe they had spawned out of sheer, idle curiosity—or in an attempt to answer the question, what if...?
Yul felt the changing ground crumble underfoot as he stepped closer. Below spread a gentle sloping hollow of grey sand sprinkled with brown boulders and flat grey rock. The crater was roughly circular, and the lip continued on to the other side where it rose in rockier formation, about a half mile away. A small meteorite had struck here. Yul reasoned, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.
Cloye snorted at the visible lack of any lifeforms and bent sideways to make her way down. But Yul held back. Three-toed creatures lurked about, or had been here, for many clawed prints lay etched upon the crumbling slopes and in the dusty soil on the plain. “Cloye, hold up,” he warned her.
She turned him a cheeky grin. “There’s nothing here, Yul. The sensors must be whacked or something. Either that or the lifeforms are farther on, perhaps on the outer edge by those rock formations. Let’s get a move on. We don’t know how much daylight is left on this weird planet.”
Yul said nothing. While he couldn’t disagree with her assumption, he was not all for running recklessly into danger. Cloye was a magnet for trouble. Even as he formulated the thought, a wild shape hopped out at Cloye, from behind a flat rock. His warning came too late. She whirled, whipped out her blaster, but the thing was almost on her. A weird half-bug, half-octopus creature, human-size.
It grazed her hip with a set of rippling appendages, raising a chitinous snout and gargling out an otherworldly cry. Not a familiar animal cry or even an insectoid chitter. Yul aimed his blaster low as he scrambled down to help her, awaiting his opportunity to blast the creature without killing her. Hresh stared on, frozen-faced.
Regaining her balance, Cloye blasted the thing as it squirmed back on all four motilators, tentacles rippling like an octopus’s. It fell, writhing in a smoking heap, charred beyond recognition.
Yul caught up and knelt beside her, gasping. “You okay?”
She nodded, recoiling at the alien monstrosity smoking a few feet from her. She kicked at it, and while they darted wary glances about, she whispered, “More of them about? Some guard?” She wrinkled her nose.
“Others might be around,” he acknowledged. He looked about with uneasy suspicion but could see no sign. “What is this weird place? Doesn’t look like a colony.”
Hresh bounced over and half-slid to a halt to study the crisped body with curious horror. “It’s alien, but nothing like I’ve seen before. Can’t say whether it’s Zikri or Mentera.”
“It’s both, is my guess,” Cloye said, unable to mask the disgust in her voice.
A glint of light caught Yul’s eye. It was several paces away toward the edge of the crater. “Over there,” he motioned.
Hresh and Cloye’s eyes narrowed, their bodies tensed. Hresh stepped back, swallowing a gulp of air.
Yul went to investigate. As he came closer to where he spied the gleam, he paused. The shiny reflection appeared to be a pool of dark water. Three other pools were nearby, no less black or limpid. A body of a spaceman lay beside the first one, his suit torn apart and the man frozen. A dull glaze of horror gripped the man’s ashen face. Ice crystals clung to a thin mustache.
Yul turned in sorrow to the foremost pool. A human figure lay trapped beneath a filmy surface, like a glass medium. The murky material showed brownish water below. Yul stepped back a pace. He tried to make sense of the scene. The figure seemed aware of the movement above him and feebly raised an arm, beckoning with a finger. Yul did a double take, blinking in confusion. Through the gloom of the water he saw that the figure wore a space suit, like his dead peer. But the face—it was so white and withered—
Yul stared on grimly. “We have to get him out of there.”
Hresh came panting beside him. “Wait, Yul, we don’t know what’s down there.”
Cloye pushed between the two. “Back off, Hresh! Are you going to leave the poor sod there?”
“I’m not saying—”
“Move back!” Yul shouldered Hresh out of the way. Cloye, clicking her tongue, hopped away to grab some rocks to crack the glassy surface entombing the victim.
When she returned, she pushed
