First Encounter Read online

  Clayton sucked in a shaky breath and smiled. This was why he’d joined Forerunner One. He couldn’t even begin to imagine all the astounding things they’d discover once they set foot on the ground.

  * * *

  Lori Reed pressed a white-gloved hand to her helmet visor, shading her eyes. She stared up at the trunks of monolithic trees bordering the beach they’d landed on. Her breathing quickened as her eyes darted from the treetops to the multiple levels of tree canopies, to the ghostly fairyland of faintly glowing vegetation on the forest floor. Her breath echoed inside her helmet, loud against the backdrop of alien hoots and chirps conveyed by her suit’s external audio pickups and the helmet’s internal speakers. The forest itself was humming like high-voltage power lines, and howling eerily with the wind gusting across the lake behind them.

  “How high are those trees?” Richard asked.

  Lori turned to see the ambassador gazing up at the trees and backpedaling quickly to get some distance so he could glimpse the treetops. Spiky stalks of blue-green alien grass crunched underfoot and rasped past the fabric of his suit as he went.

  The rest of the team stood close by, contemplating the forest. The military officers distinguished themselves by carrying rifles that dangled from shoulder straps, and stun pistols holstered at their hips. Lori and Dr. Grouse saved all of their energy to carry the Visualizers and holo projectors in their packs, as well as a variety of other scanners. Doctor Stevens had the sample jars and vials in his pack, while the soldiers carried survival gear and spare ammo in theirs.

  If there were any intelligent aliens down here to meet, Lori hoped those soldiers would have the good sense to hold their fire.

  “Let’s head in,” Captain Cross said, turning to regard them with one hand on the grip of his stocky, short-barreled white and gray rifle. Lori didn’t know much about firearms, but Richard had told her while the soldiers were all arming themselves in the hangar that those rifles were coil guns. They apparently shot hypervelocity rounds that could pierce armored targets and punch fist-sized holes through living ones.

  The captain struck a commanding silhouette against the dark wall of trees—tall and broad-shouldered, his arms bulging through his suit. If she didn’t know he was the captain, Lori might easily have mistaken him for a Marine.

  The others nodded their agreement, and the captain led the way into the forest. Commander Taylor and the former Marine, Delta, followed close behind.

  They each had enough oxygen for two hours. A timer on the bright green heads-up-display projected on the inside of Lori’s helmet showed that she had an hour and fifty-one minutes left. Still plenty of time to explore before they headed back.

  Shadows descended over them as they passed beneath the tree canopies. The deeper they went, the darker it got, but faintly glowing growths on the tree trunks and the forest floor emitted a ghostly white light. The light was roughly equivalent to a full moon on Earth. For Lori, it was enough to see by, but the officers quickly snapped on the ring lights built into the frames around their helmet visors to better illuminate the way. Lori and Richard belatedly followed suit with their own helmet lamps. Small creatures with too many legs skittered away from the beam shining out of her helmet. Other creatures took flight, absorbing and re-emitting the light cast by their helmets in a shimmering rainbow of colors.

  “Look at that!” Dr. Grouse said, pointing to one of them. “What is it?”

  “Rainbow bug,” Delta grunted.

  “Good a name as any,” Captain Cross replied.

  Lori slowed to watch one of them as it flew away, bobbing upward on four, perfectly circular wings at the ends of long straight black stalks. The creature’s translucent body pulsed blue, then violet, then green, then yellow, then red.... Those bugs flew in lazy spirals, somehow looking both graceful and clumsy at the same time.

  The landing party walked on for another ten minutes, marveling at the sheer number of creeping and crawling creatures, most of which began glowing as soon as the party’s helmet lamps hit them. Each creature was stranger and more exotic than the last.

  The group had to stop periodically for Doctor Stevens to take samples of the flora. He even captured one of the glowing rainbow bugs in a jar, which he spirited away into his pack before the captain could say anything about it. All of the sample containers were perfectly sealed to prevent contamination of the shuttle when they returned, which meant that poor bug would die in the name of science. Lori tried not to let that bother her, but it did.

  “Everybody freeze!” Captain Cross’s voice stopped Lori cold before she even realized what he’d said.

  She noticed something up ahead, frozen under the captain’s helmet lights and clinging to a tree trunk about twenty feet up. This was a much larger creature than any of the others they’d encountered so far. It had brown skin, the color of the tree, and ten long, lanky legs with what looked like two elbows each. Loose folds of skin hung under some of those legs, stretched taut in other places. It’s limbs are webbed like a flying squirrel, Lori thought. The creature looked to be hairless, but it had sharp quills running down its back, and a bony, triangular face with a sharp black beak and two dark eyes that seemed to blaze with curiosity. Or perhaps they were blazing with something deadlier than that.

  Before any of them could react, the creature’s eyes flared to twice their size, and it’s beak parted in a feral cry. A glowing collar of skin fanned out from its neck. It gave a rattling hiss that reminded her of a rattle snake, and then everything was washed out by a blinding flash of light. They stumbled around, trying to clear their vision. Lori recovered in time to see a dark shadow leaping away from the tree, the webbed folds of skin under its legs pulling taut and catching the air like a parachute. The creature screamed as it swooped down on them, and the soldiers’ weapons snapped up, taking aim.

  “No!” Lori cried.

  Chapter 7

  “Hold your fire!” Clayton cried even as he reached for his sidearm and took aim.

  He flicked off the safety and left his coil gun to swing free at the end of the strap as he tracked the blurry brown creature gliding down on them.

  He aimed for center mass, just like he’d been taught all those years ago in basic. He’d had plenty of time to train in the ranges both virtual and real since then, and when Clayton squeezed the trigger, a long silver projectile exploded from the barrel heading straight for the flying monkey. The projectile broke apart and spread out like a net as proximity sensors detected that it was close to its target. Multiple sharp metal rods embedded themselves into the alien, all connected by hair-thin wires to the central rod. Forks of bright blue electricity coursed over the creature, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. It shrieked and shivered, limbs spasming and curling in around its body. As soon as it did that, it fell like a stone and hit hard in the ankle-deep cushion of vegetation on the forest floor.

  Silence rang, and the creature didn’t stir.

  “Good shot, sir!” Delta crowed as he strode toward the target with his coil gun raised. “Target neutralized,” he said a moment later. “Life signs are good. I think. Looks like I’m getting... two heart beats. Or... three? I’m not qualified for this. Doc!”

  Doctor Stevens hurried over, shaking his head. “No animal could possibly have three hearts. They’d wind up pumping blood in opposite directions!”

  Clayton and the others crowded around, and his own heads-up display revealed the same thing that Delta had just reported. Three distinct pulses, starting in the head, then the chest, and finally a third one in the stomach. They fired in a tandem rhythm, one after another, but the periodic pulses of electricity from the stun round were visibly interrupting that rhythm. With each shock, the creature tensed up and let out a whistling cry that sounded too weak and pitiful to be menacing.

  Clayton frowned, wondering how to deal with the situation. If they removed the stun rods, the creature could recover and attack them, and then they might be forced to answer with more lethal force.

>   “Let it go! Now!” Dr. Reed cried, dropping to her haunches beside the creature. “You’re going to kill it!”

  “She’s right, sir,” Commander Taylor said.

  Clayton could see her expression pinched in sympathy behind her mask. Somehow that flying monkey had gone from hostile alien to three-legged puppy in a span of seconds, and he was the one who had crippled it.

  “Sir?” Delta looked to him for confirmation.

  Clayton gave in with a sigh and a nod. “Do it. Everyone else, back up and give the man some space.”

  Delta waited a beat while they withdrew, then bent down and yanked the stun rods out in one smooth motion. He leapt back, his rifle snapping up to his shoulder to cover the creature as he backpedaled away from it.

  The creature struggled to rise, almost collapsing twice in the process. Finally it regained its footing, but it held two of its ten legs up at crooked angles. Clayton winced, realizing that it had broken those limbs in the fall. The creature was still making that whistling sound. The sound of alien pain. It shook itself out like a dog, and then its eight good legs scuttled as it turned on the spot to face them with wide, angry black eyes.

  Clayton waited, his breath rasping and loud inside his helmet. This thing was either going to bolt or charge. Fight or flight. It chose option three and threw its head back to release a deafening cry. Echoes of that sound bounced back from the trees at different pitches and volumes. Clayton searched the canopy for the source and found it. Dozens of glowing collars flared out, peppering the darkness with bright flashes of light and ominous rattling sounds.

  Then, all at once, those glowing creatures began drifting down from the tree tops, angling in swiftly from all sides.

  “Captain! What are your orders?” Delta asked, his voice rising in alarm as he swept his coil gun back and forth.

  Clayton didn’t have to think about it for long. There had to be at least fifty of those monkeys descending on them, and he hadn’t landed on Trappist-1E to initiate a mass slaughter of the first complex lifeforms that they encountered. For all they knew these creatures could even be intelligent.

  “Fall back!” Clayton cried.

  “All right!” Delta cried. “You heard the Captain! Double time! Move, move, move! Back to the shuttle!”

  Alpha Team hesitated for the briefest second, and then broke and ran, their collective boots hammering the forest floor in a stampede. The ring lamps from their helmets bobbed and weaved as they went, throwing dancing beams of light and shadow through the forest. Rainbow bugs spiraled around them, and crawling things reflected the light from their lamps back in ever-changing hues. Clayton brought up the rear with Commander Taylor and Lieutenant Delta. He glanced back periodically to check for signs of pursuit—of which there were plenty. All of them in the air. Dozens of those moneys were soaring down, overtaking them on both sides, their glowing neck rings making them easy targets in the gloomy forest.

  “They’re trying to outflank us, sir!” Delta said. “We can’t allow that to happen. Permission to rattle their feathers with live ammo?”

  Clayton shook his head and spared a breath to say, “Denied. Just keep running! We don’t know if they’re hostile yet.”

  “With all due respect, sir, they’re acting pretty hostile,” Delta replied.

  “He’s right,” Taylor added. “We need to scare them off. Or at least thin their numbers.”

  “Fine, but no live rounds! Stun only. Let’s pick off as many as we can, and aim for the ones closest to the ground. We don’t want the fall to kill them.”

  “Copy that,” Delta said, already drawing his stun pistol and taking aim. Taylor did the same, and Clayton reluctantly drew his sidearm again. Each of them was packed with a clip of ten stun rounds, or electrodarts, as they were sometimes called.

  Glinting silver darts flashed out to all sides as they ran, but aiming and running were mutually exclusive affairs, and most of those shots missed. The ones that hit had much the same effect as the last time. Outstretched limbs curled inward and those creatures fell with a crash.

  “You could still be killing them with those stun rounds!” Dr. Reed pointed out from the front of the group where she was running behind Ambassador Morgan. He was leading the charge back to the shuttle.

  They reached the edge of the trees, and burst into the field of spiky blue-green grass where they’d landed. A sequence of alien cries followed them out of the trees, and thunder rolled overhead. The storm was directly above them now and fat drops of rain lanced down to splat noisily on their pressure suits.

  The darkness swirled with rain, and flying ten-legged monsters chased them out on both sides, corralling them back to their shuttle.

  Maybe they really were intelligent.

  Still no signs of aggression, though. That was good.

  They reached the shuttle without incident, and ran up the short landing ramp to the airlock. Clayton triggered it open remotely and they piled in just as they reached the top of the ramp. He shut the outer door on a cacophony of shrill cries. Commander Taylor used the control panel inside the door to activate the decontamination cycle.

  Flashing red lights warned of the danger if they didn’t keep their helmets and gloves on. A computerized female voice added an extra warning: “Decontamination commencing...”

  Doctor Stevens unslung his pack, zipped it open, and began removing the sample jars, placing them in a decon bin to one side of the airlock. Dr. Reed did the same with her sample containers.

  A fine mist began hissing out to all sides, fogging the visors of their helmets, and blurring their view of one another.

  That went on for several minutes before the flashing red lights stopped and began pulsing out blue light, as well as several other invisible and more dangerous wavelengths. Their suits would protect them from that brief exposure, but in theory any microbes would be annihilated by the combination of sprays and radiation pulses.

  Finally, the lights stopped pulsing, and the mist cleared. A green light snapped on above the inner airlock door and a pleasant chime sounded as it slid open.

  “Decontamination sequence complete,” the voice from before said.

  Not even bothering to exit the airlock first, Clayton reached up and unsnapped the seals around his neck and then pulled his helmet off, sucking in a deep breath of uncanned air. The air was acrid with decon chemicals, but still fresher than gagging on the sour tang of his own sweat.

  Several others took their helmets off, too. Delta pushed through the airlock and started down the rows of seats in the cabin. He leaned over to the nearest window and peered out.

  “No sign of the bastards,” he muttered.

  Clayton nodded and followed Dr. Reed, Morgan, and Taylor out. Doctor Stevens hung back to retrieve his sample jars from the decon bin.

  They crowded the aisle of the shuttle, each picking a window to stare out. Rain streaked the windows, pelting the hull with tinny reports.

  Morgan breathed a sigh. “I guess we’ll have to wait for the storm to pass before we go back out.”

  “Go back out?” Clayton echoed. He shook his head. “We’re not going back out. We’re going up to the Forerunner.”

  “What?” Morgan asked, his blue eyes hard and blond eyebrows dropping dark shadows over them. “We have to go back out! This is what we came here for. What are you suggesting, that we just run and hide in our ship, and then what? Live out the rest of our days in orbit? I’d never have pegged you for a coward, Captain.”

  Clayton gritted his teeth and scowled. “If you’d let me finish, I was about to suggest that we go back up, analyze Doctor Stevens’ samples, and then send down the HEROs. In fact, we probably should have led with that as our first option. We wouldn’t have had to run out of that forest if we were remote-piloting HEROs instead of rocking these meat suits.” Clayton plucked at the fabric of his Space Force uniform.

  “You can’t make first contact with a robot!” Morgan objected. “Where is your spirit of adventure?”

&
nbsp; “I burned it off running from hostile aliens.”

  Dr. Reed’s gaze skipped back and forth between them, as if she wasn’t sure whose side to take. Then she abruptly frowned and began looking around in alarm.

  “Is there something wrong, Dr. Reed?” Clayton asked.

  “Where is David?” she asked in a low voice. “Where is Dr. Grouse?” she asked again, her voice becoming shrill with fear.

  Clayton blinked in shock and spun in a quick circle, taking a head count. Dr. Grouse was missing. He stared hard at the airlock along with Taylor and Delta.

  “No one noticed that he was missing?” Clayton asked, reprimanding himself with that statement as much as anyone.

  “I volunteer to go out and look for him, sir,” Delta said.

  “Negative. We’re going out together—Commander, stay with the shuttle and update the Forerunner. Tell them to send down the HEROs. We’re going to grid search this entire area all night if we have to.”

  “Copy that,” Taylor said, already striding for the cockpit.

  “Delta, on me,” Clayton said, heading the other way back to the airlock. He dropped his helmet back on and snapped the seals back into place.

  Just as he was about to slap the airlock controls to cycle it once more, he heard something.

  A heavy thunk on the outer door. He slowly turned to face it. “Did you hear that, Lieutenant?”

  “Affirmative,” Delta said and jammed the stock of his coil gun into his shoulder to aim it at the doors. But no more sounds followed. “Could just be the storm blowing something into the hull,” he said.