Aurona, page 10
Dumfounded, he tried his best to reason things out, but had to give up quickly. The emergency resuscitation hadn’t been gentle by any means. There was a long trickle of blood running down his chest where the needle had gone in just below the sternum. He blotted it off with a towel and yanked on his uniform.
Well, it was quite evident that it was up to him to get everyone out of this mess. He ran his hands over the surface of their pods. They were smooth, unmarred by a single dial, switch or visible opening; in fact, they seemed to have the same unblemished skin as the hull of the starship! How could he possibly get anyone out to help him? Feeling drugged, he staggered into the elevator, rode it up to the control room, and lurched drunkenly into his commander’s seat. Maybe there was a menu to open a few pods and get some help? The ship’s external attitude display was showing the blinking red outline of the saucer. He shook his head in disbelief.
The starship had plunged straight in, cutting into the planet like a knife! “We’re-we’re standing on edge? No way! How can I still walk around? What’s holding me up?” Another short search revealed the answer. A small light pulsed near the monitor. “Artificial Gravity - On,” it read. He shrugged. “My head isn’t together yet, I guess.” He slapped his palms, trying to get rid of the pins and needles. “So let’s see now: maybe I can pull up out of the ground with some manual thrust….” As he slid the levers gently forward, the mighty antigrav engines labored. Nothing moved!
Breathing a quick prayer, he opened all twelve channels to the external display monitors and scanned them one by one. Every camera was blank except one. Alpha D was still protruding from the surface, but the ground was quickly rising under it!
“Holy moley, I gotta move!” He leaped out of his seat and lurched through a maze of corridors to the airlock. Suiting up into explorer’s gear and survival knapsack, he threw the ship’s tiny, oval transponder into a zippered pocket. Seconds before he opened the inner hatch, he suddenly remembered the artificial gravity.
“Stop, Adam! No more mistakes now!” He reasoned it out then entered, shut the inner hatch, held on tightly to the ladder, and pressed a button with his elbow. Sure enough, as the outer hatch opened, he felt gravity shifting quickly around him.
He gazed out into a nightmare world. An unknown substance blasted against his face shield in a gale force wind and all around in a great circle, strange, tall objects were waving eerily. Something stuck onto his gloves, a white, powdery substance. Before he had time to react, a torrent of the white particles poured into the airlock!
As he shoveled frantically against the tide, he had a sudden, sinking feeling. “What’ve I done?” he agonized. “I can’t shut the outer airlock now! He looked down behind him. “That means there’s no way I can open the inner airlock either, because this stuff’ll spill into the ship around the seals and prop it open! We’ll depressurize! I gotta get outside right now or get buried alive!” He frantically checked his equipment one last time. “Man,” he lamented, “I really blew it big time!” At the last possible second, he dove out of the shrinking opening and clawed his way up a steep slope, grabbing some weird, sinewy objects.
There was a loud crack. Something big toppled over and swung up behind Adam in an arc, whistling through the air. A stunning blow to the back of his helmet sent his body spinning out of the crater. He blacked out as the ship disappeared under a relentless tide of moving ground.
Chapter 6: MAROONED
The small planet’s scorching sun rose over a strange, desert landscape. As the temperature climbed, the wind followed suit and picked up to a gale force. A shadowless, translucent brilliance of flying silica crystals quickly filled the air in a swirling maelstrom, obliterating the horizons. Land and sky merged as one into a total whiteout.
Out in the middle of the vast plain of nothingness, a small geyser of crystals erupted as a fist punched through the surface. Adam awoke with a start, gasping for air. Total darkness enveloped him, as close and stifling as death. He pushed hard with his feet. They met resistance; something seemed to be enveloping his body and restricting his movements. Fear rose in waves. Taking quick, deep breaths, he fought valiantly to calm himself, his mind reeling with dire scenarios. His wrist was throbbing painfully beneath him, as if it were caught in some kind of a tourniquet. He pulled. No go.
Fighting panic, he turned on a low level of light inside his helmet and dropped down some menus to check his stats. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he spotted the pedometer and time graph. “What?” he gasped. “Seven miles? I walked seven miles? He blinked in disbelief. “And then I passed out for fourteen hours after that?” He slumped back. “Wow, I didn’t pass out, I watched my whole life whizzing by in some kind of a rerun! It seemed like an eternity! Was it a dream?” He struggled to figure it out, but to no avail; his recent memory simply refused to come back. He grimaced in pain, pulling at his wrist.
“I can’t breathe!” He choked. “Why’s it so hard to breathe? And where in blazes is this, some kind of a hole? How’d I get in here?” Something was moving. He looked up. A 3D schematic of his e-helmet was spinning in split-screen up in the corner of his face shield. As it rotated, he could plainly see the back of his helmet. The rebreather unit was badly dented, probably from a massive blow to his head. “Whoa! My helmet’s crushed? Definitely not good news!” He looked at it again, scowling.
“Wait: I didn’t call up this function; I must’ve been checking this schematic before I passed out!” He studied the timeline. Sure enough, the twin tubes of his rebreather’s emergency snorkel had been deployed fourteen hours ago, and were now just barely poking through a rising surface. “How much did I do? Is there more?” Dazed and confused, he reeled in the tubes and pushed upward with his free hand. Fortunately, the silica was light.
He tugged his wrist again. Yes, it was definitely caught on something. He dug quickly, piles of crystals flying, working in an ever-widening circle. In moments the stabbing, blinding sunlight took over. “Whoa!” He turned away from it quickly, squinting into the shadows. Taking a breath, he finished digging. His eyes widened. A cable? Yes, some kind of snare was wrapped around his wrist, grayish green and frosted with crystals! As he finished clearing off the slick surface, he felt a shudder. He paused, his fingers resting lightly on the surface. The coil started to squirm at his touch! He yanked his hand away, his heart pounding. “Holy cow! Th-this thing’s alive??” Tentatively, he pushed at it again. It shook violently, writhing in spasms. “Woah, this bad boy hates that!”
He leaned back, thinking.”Well, it moved, and that’s a whole lot better than shutting off my circulation.” A sudden idea crossed his mind. “Hey, lemme push the envelope!” Determinedly, he wrapped his gloved hand around the cable and held on. It shuddered, writhed, then stretched out like an uncoiling spring and … let go! He snatched his arm away and scrambled out of the hole, watching in mixed fear and wonderment.
Hissing through the thin atmosphere, a huge gray-green coil rose gracefully out of the shallow crater, unfolding like a steel fern. The glistening trunk undulated like a tentacle into the sky and, in seconds, a long, tapering whip was towering fifty feet over his head!
Staring open-mouthed, he quickly scooted away on his butt. Something was happening near the top. He squinted at it suspiciously, shielding his eyes. The long whip was starting to transform, the diameter subtly swelling and splitting along tiny vertical grooves. With a series of popping noises, it fanned open into a web of ever-increasing complexity, each successive strand splitting and resplitting in a highly ordered sequence. Within a few breaths, he found himself sitting at the base of a fantastic, flat, two-dimensional webbed tree of mammoth proportions!
As it started to sway back and forth, he took no chances and sprang to his feet. The giant frond simply rotated on its axis and stopped, presenting itself broadside to the howling wind. Instantly, it trapped millions of the flying, glittering crystal shards in its delicate web. With this final transformation, it became a vision of ethereal beauty.
He gasped, blinking in a daze, turning in a slow circle. The wind had subsided a bit and the horizon now stretched all around him, flat and unbroken. “W-where am I? How’d I get to this God-forsaken, whiteout planet? This sure isn’t Aurona!” Rubbing his head and neck, he tried desperately to remember something, anything.
A spark lit up. “My ship!” He looked around. “Yes, where’s my ship? I-I don’t remember any landing sequence! Where’d it go?” The strange surface kept giving away as he turned in a circle; it seemed to be loosely packed under his feet. He bounced up and down, kicking up chunks of the powdery ground and testing his weight in the superlight gravity. As the breeze swirled the clumps of crystals into the air, his eyes followed the wafting stream back up to the tree. It glittered like spun sugar—no, like diamonds dazzling brilliantly in the light! He gasped, overcome, exhilarated.
He was an accidental traveler on an alien world, alive, but living in a dream!
Feeling a bit bolder and keeping a wary eye on the webbed top, he sidled up to the trunk and poked it. Nothing moved. Slowly, carefully, he wrapped his gloved hands around the thick stem and gave it a squeeze. Immediately, a great tremor shook the plant! He stared at it in shock. “What is this thing, a plant or an animal?” He knit his brow, figuring, then flexed his fingers, studying his biofeedback gloves. “Hmm, could there be an electrical field? I know my whole suit’s internally microwired with electronic systems….”
The specs reeled out: the gloves were a masterpiece of technology with a fantastically complex neural network that could amplify his fingertip’s delicate sense of touch and monitor his skin temperature, moisture, and grip pressure. The engineers had even added sophisticated shape recognition for working in the dark, and they…. He stopped short. “Whoa, whoa! Why can I remember all this complicated tech stuff verbatim, but I can’t remember the simple, vital things, like how’d I get here and where’d my ship disappear to?” Unbidden, a disturbing thought percolated through his mind.
“No! It can’t be!” he gasped. “I’ve got … amnesia? Did that blow to the back of my head give me some kind of short-term memory loss?” Frowning he dismissed the thought, denying it could have possibly happened to him.
After a moment of denial and self-examination, he reconsidered, then bit his lip as he faced the truth: he’d been winged. Hopefully, prayerfully, his memory would return or he’d be stuck here for good. No food, no water, no ship, no Adam. It wouldn’t take long.
He let out a sigh. “Well, I just gotta be patient. This is memory stuff is a bit dicey. I’ve heard that some people’s memory returns right away, but others take a lot longer.”
Glancing down at his gloves again, the list of specs resumed right where it left off, reeling effortlessly through his mind. Suddenly, his brows rose. Yes! A thought clicked into place, something his grandfather mentioned on the holodisc. There was something the glove’s engineers hadn’t been able to filter out: almost as a by-product, the gloves emitted a strong electrical force of their own, amplifying his body’s Kirlian effect!
He looked up excitedly. “Amplifying? Maybe I’ve got all this Kirlian electricity shooting out of my fingertips, only megastrong?” A ray of hope washed over him. “Wow! I-I might be able to control this weird plant electronically! Let’s see, I know sunflowers follow the sun using cell turgidity and relaxation, so maybe, just maybe….” Impulsively, he reached out to test his theory: wrapping both gloved hands tightly around the stem, he circled to the other side of the frond and then let go.
It followed! Unbelievably, majestically, the huge, flat network over his head followed his path, twisting completely around! It stopped when he stopped, disgorging itself of the wind-whipped, flying crystals. Immediately, it caught them on the backside, and in seconds the web was full again, like nothing had happened.
“Good night, it’s true!” he gasped. “I-I can control it!”
As he pondered his new discovery, he sensed a distant rumble. He jerked his head up suspiciously. Tapping out his e-helmet’s radar function, he scanned the horizon. At one point a single, vertical line ran halfway up his face screen. Puzzled, he leaned to one side and then the other, but it remained in the same spot. “Hmm.” He eyed it suspiciously. “Could be just a glitch … I-I hope.” The tapering outline was soon broken up by a storm of crystals and it disappeared.
Suddenly, he felt a stab of pain. As he rubbed his temples, a sliver of recent memory slipped out. “The transponder!” he gasped. “The ship’s wireless transponder! I have it! I-I remember! It’ll show me where the ship is!” He fumbled through his pockets excitedly. “Where is that little sucker? Crud! Too many stupid zippers!” He fished around for a few minutes but gave up abruptly as the shadow of the plant crossed his feet.
He looked up. It was moving again, trembling and opening even further. Intrigued, he stretched up on his toes to pull down a section of the frond. The resilience surprised him; it felt like tempered steel. He tugged it down closer to his face. “Huh? What’s this? The crystals on the surface are moving?” As he tapped out the code for microvision on his chin pad, a sharp world of giant crystals and colossal webs filled the screen. “Wow,” he gushed, “what fantastic equipment!” His eyes swept in wonder across a glittering, virtual 3D panorama. “Grandpa said an alien race called the Bitrons invented these helmets. I’d sure like to meet them some day.”
The jagged crystals seemed to be covered with tiny crumbs of organic material, and were carried along by tiny filaments on the webs. Millions of them, like cilia, were cleaning and turning each irregular shard to every facet. Suddenly, it came to him.
“Food! This plant’s eating the food that’s stuck all over the crystals, just like a whale feeding on plankton!” He looked closer. Sure enough, at every fork in the web, a mouthlike opening was engulfing food particles, then several longer, specialized cilia were flicking away the empty crystals. He scowled. Something just didn’t add up. He let go of the frond and watched it whip away. “So if that’s food, where does it all come from?”
He studied the ground, pushing the soft crystal strata around with his toe. It broke up easily, like powdered snow. Kneeling on the spot, he rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a lightweight carbon fiber folding shovel and snapped it onto a set of matching brackets on his forearm. He dug deeply around the base of the tree, moved outward slightly in a widening circle, and then dug several shallow trenches. In fifteen minutes, he’d revealed what he wanted to know: the trunk had one deep taproot, bulging and apparently full of food, and then with almost geometric precision, the root sent out runners in every direction under the surface. Each runner ended in another coil, poised and ready to spring upward. As he folded up his shovel, his eyes widened at the possibilities. The entire planet could be connected with an underground web of these things!
As sweat from the exertion began to run into his eyes, an annoying, imperative yellow light flashed dead center in his face shield. He looked up in alarm. Shade! He needed to find shade; the suit’s power supply and rebreather unit simply couldn’t be overtaxed much longer! He scanned the blazing horizon again, this time switching to a color-enhanced infrared temperature mode. Wait, was that a cooler-looking crescent of deep blue-black sky in the distance? Was night and relief from the heat coming?
He stopped suddenly, listening, the hair rising on the back of his neck. An eerie, low wail was coming from behind him. He turned around slowly, every sense on alert.
“No!” he gasped. His once-majestic frond was disintegrating, blackening, and falling apart with huge holes in its delicate webbing! He leaned closer. The sound was whistling through the dying plant’s thousands of mouths as it withered and shrank, expelling the planet’s nitrogenous atmosphere. It recoiled to the ground, swiftly turning brittle and drying up in the blistering heat. Suddenly, he felt responsible. “Wow! I-I opened you up in the daytime and upset your natural biorhythm? You come up … at night?”
As if in direct answer, the root jerked spasmodically and sent the top flying. His jaw dropped. Like tumbleweed, the dry, coiled frond rolled toward the distant shimmering horizon and the eerie wailing faded away. Soon only the sound of the wind remained.
After a moment, humor finally got the better of him. “So,” he grinned lopsidedly, “the, ah, network expelled a nonfunctioning member, hmm? Just like real life! Cut and dried!” He chortled, feeling better. His fierce headache was finally abating.
The wind was lessening, too. Gazing at the dark nighttime horizon, he tapped out scope vision on his chin pad. As it snapped toward him, he involuntarily fell backward onto the drifts of silica. He got up, brushing himself off. “Man! Talk about weird and spooky! That horizon’s sure got a strange, fuzzy, moving edge to it!” He squinted at it again, trying to understand what he was seeing. Was his vision deteriorating from the lack of oxygen? “Wow, it looks … alive! Could it be my eyes? Is the scope vision damaged? Holy cow, this whole planet’s a nightmare!”
He gritted his teeth in frustration, fumbling through his pockets. “And where’s that stupid transponder?” Gathering his wits, he forced himself to calm down. Sweat was now pouring down his back, and the annoying buzzers and flashing readouts were warning that the temperature inside his suit had finally risen to the peak of the dreaded red zone. He shrugged and gave in to the inevitable. Yes, thank goodness he remembered this trick! Kneeling, he shoveled out a shallow body-sized depression in the soft silica and settled into it, pulling handfuls of the stuff over him.
Nearly two hours passed. Darkness had fallen as he’d rested and the wind had subsided dramatically to a steady, gentle breeze. He snapped awake, his senses overriding his dreams. Was the ground stirring around him? He sat bolt upright, the silica flying off his body. “A quake!” he gasped. “It’s gotta be, the ground’s definitely moving!”
