David Simpson - Post-Human Trilogy

The sonic boom percussion felt like the explosion of a nearby landmine. The members of the team were seemingly all able to ride it out, and Craig’s eyes flew back open when the turbulence seemed to settle. The position of the four others in the triangle formation remained perfect, but the green dot signifying Robbie’s position on Craig’s HUD was suddenly dropping away behind him, moving further and further from the team.

“Doc, did you just lose your robot friend?” Wilson shouted.

“Looks like it,” Craig confirmed. There was no way to turn his head to get a visual confirmation, but it appeared the boom had sent Robbie into a tailspin behind them. “It’s okay. If he recovers from the spin and lands all right, he’ll double-time it to our target and meet us.”

“All right,” Wilson replied.

A second later, Craig’s HUD suddenly went blank, before briefly turning back on and then going blank once again.

“Uh, my HUD just went down,” Weddell stated in controlled alarm.

“Mine too,” Craig replied.

“We’re all down,” Wilson quickly realized. “We’re gonna have to open high and do it manually!”

Then, just as suddenly as they had flashed off, the HUDs came back online.

“I’m back up!” Craig shouted.

“Is everyone back up?” Wilson shouted.

Each member of the team confirmed.

“Okay! Then we stick to the original plan. Adjust to thirty-five degrees!”

Craig watched the time to opening tick down on his HUD. They were now only a minute away from their computer-controlled low opening. Their speed was slowing, but something didn’t feel right.

“Commander, have the onboard SOLO systems ever glitched like this before?” Craig asked.

“No. This is a first,” Wilson replied.

“Then I recommend we do a high manual—”

“Cut the chatter, Doc!” Wilson shouted. “Concentrate!”

The yellow dust covering the ground was closing in below them, its surface gleaming in the sunlight as it crawled like a yellow, living fog. The impact crater into which they were supposed to be touching down wasn’t visible.

A horrifying possibility suddenly reached into Craig’s skull and drummed its frozen fingers over his brain. The time readout was now below twenty seconds. “Oh no,” he whispered. “I’m taking command!” Craig suddenly shouted, nearly screaming in desperation. “Open your chutes now! Override! Override!”

“Belay that order!” Commander Wilson shouted back.

“Override! Override!”

Ten seconds…

“Follow protocol, SOLO!” Wilson screamed.

“The telemetry’s wrong! Open! Open!” Craig bellowed furiously. He opened his chute, the wind catching it hard as it unfurled, tugging him into a dramatic deceleration. The other members of his team fell away into the yellow dust, disappearing as though they’d been figments of his imagination.

Craig continued to float downward for several seconds, the yellow dust reaching upward to envelop his boots. “SOLO team, do you copy? Commander Wilson? Do you copy?”

The silence continued for a few seconds more before, finally, Weddell’s voice crackled through the interference. “Doc! Commander Wilson is…he’s dead, sir.”

Craig touched down in a thick yellow cloud of dust. His parachute ejected automatically so he wouldn’t be dragged away into the dust storm. Above, the sun’s rays were nearly visible, suggesting that the dust cloud was abating, as predicted, but for now, he was blinded, with only his HUD to guide him. “Weddell, I’m on your three o’clock,” Craig said, “fifteen meters away.”

“Copy.”

The green dot on Craig’s HUD that signified Wilson was also still active, and Weddell’s dot was next to it. Cheng and Klein had vanished. Craig strode in his exoskeleton, only a few steps taking him most of the way to the quickly materializing silhouette of Weddell, leaning over the crumpled form of Wilson. A couple strides more, and the image came into focus, the stark reality of Wilson’s nearly pulverized body emerging.

“You were right, Doc,” Weddell said as he turned his head to look up at Craig. “The telemetry was all wrong. I played it safe and followed your orders at the last second. My chute opened in time, but I hit the surface hard.” He turned and looked down at his fallen officer-in-charge. “Commander Wilson didn’t even open his chute. He…God, he hit the ground at terminal velocity.” He shook his head. “I saw him hit.”

Craig dropped to his knees and tried to get a view of Wilson’s face, but the commander had fallen face down, and his helmet had burrowed into an impact crater of its own creation. Craig could read Wilson’s absent vitals on his HUD, so it seemed true that the commander was, indeed, dead. But the SOLO team were super soldiers . “There might still be hope,” Craig said to Weddell.

“What? What are you talking about? I saw him hit the ground myself. He’s dead as dead, Doc.”

Craig pushed Wilson’s pulverized body so that it turned over, revealing the golden reflective facemask. He popped Wilson’s mask up so he could see inside the helmet; the visor was splashed with blood, but Wilson’s head appeared to be intact. “The respirocytes,” Craig replied. “His brain is still getting oxygen. If I can get him into suspended animation fast enough—”

“I understand,” Weddell quickly said. “SOLO team, do you copy?” The radio crackled for a few moments, but there were periodic pops and chirps, and one sounded like it might be a voice. “Did you hear that?” Weddell asked Craig.

“Yes. Weddell, they were on the far right of the formation.” Craig stood to his feet and stepped a few paces through the yellow dust before he quickly stumbled over a ledge, tumbling onto his stomach, digging hard with his exoskeleton’s strength into the earth to keep from tumbling further down the steep incline. “Damn it! Weddell, we just missed the crater! It was to the south! If Klein and Cheng opened manually, they might have made it!”

“That makes sense,” Weddell replied excitedly. “The crater goes down one kilometer. If they’re far enough down there, that would explain why we can’t get radio contact through all the interference.”

Craig finished crawling back up over the lip of the crater and returned to see Weddell standing, having retrieved his twin machine guns from his backpack. The guns were gigantic, and the armor-piercing bullets made them far too heavy to be carried by a regular human; fortunately the exoskeleton did 100 percent of the heavy lifting.

“I can head down there,” Weddell said determinedly. “If they’re already there, I’ll establish contact, and we can still finish the mission. You should stay here and wait for Robbie to return. We might need that thing after all.”

“There’s a problem with that plan,” Craig replied.

“What?”

“I don’t think that was just a glitch with our telemetry. I think we were sabotaged. New coordinates were fed to us at the last minute, pushing us off target so we’d miss the crater and hit the outer surface.”

“Are you saying—”

“ The A.I. is still functioning . Somehow, it detected us and tried to defend itself.”

Weddell’s face was ghost white. “That’s bad news, Doc.”

“If you get down there and don’t make contact with Cheng and Klein, my advice is that you toss as much Semtex down that hole as you can and haul your ass back up. We’ll head back to the extraction point and report what we know.”

“Agreed,” Weddell replied. “Stay here. I’m going to go dark pretty quick with all this interference, but I’ll contact you ASAP, when I’m making my way back up.”