Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“Let’s get a little closer to that beacon, but be careful.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Halley replies. “You may want to buckle in again back there, just in case.”

We make a wide turn to the right, until the enormous white spire is right in the center of the Wasp’s windshield. The appearance of it somehow matches that of the beings which erected it—tall, thin, graceful, and imposing. Halley does a quick measurement with the optical targeting system of the Wasp, and declares that the structure ahead measures twenty-eight hundred feet from its base to the point where the stem disappears in the clouds overhead.

“I’m getting the faintest return on radar now,” she says. “I’m going to stop painting it with the beam. Don’t want to piss off the locals.”

From our position, the spot where the beacon is sending out its regular, mindless electronic wails is on the opposite side of the huge stem. Halley decreases altitude while taking the ship around the trunk in a left-hand turn that gives me a perfect view of the structure. By now, we’re less than a quarter mile away from it, and I can see small imperfections in the surface I hadn’t noticed before, irregular bumps and knots that reinforce the grown look of the spire.

“Five hundred feet up,” Halley says. “That’s about as low as I care to go, I think.”

The place where the other drop ship crashed into the planet’s surface is easy to spot. There’s an impact mark on the ground, just a few hundred feet from the base of the spire, and a scorched furrow leading away from the initial mark. At the end of the blackened scar in the rocky soil, there’s a debris field, and the shattered wreck of what was once Stinger Six-One. The remains of the drop ship are mangled so badly that I wouldn’t recognize it if I didn’t know what a Wasp looks like in undamaged condition. Halley makes a low pass over the crash site, and I can see that parts of the wreckage are still burning.

“See any chutes?” Halley asks.

“I don’t know. What am I looking for?”

“The outside of the canopy is camo, and the inside orange. You can use ‘em as signal markers for the SAR birds.”

I look around the crash site as we circle overhead, but I don’t see anything other than broken and twisted bits of drop ship. When I glance over to the base of the alien structure, I notice something else, however—there are scorch marks and impact splatters marring the surface of the spire.

“Looks like your buddies tried to take a chunk out of it,” I say to Halley, and point to the damage. She looks over to the stem and observes the impact marks for a moment.

“Well, shit. So they did. The dumbass Rickman thinks with his balls most of the time. Figures he’d make an attack run on that thing.”

“Wonder how they brought that ship down. Think they got weapons?”

“I’m not too interested in finding out,” Halley says. “Let’s get out of here before we do.”

“Attention, all Versailles personnel. This is the XO. Remain at your location, and do not attempt to reach any colony settlements. We have hostile invaders on this planet, and you are ordered to lay low and avoid contact until our rescue ship arrives. I repeat, do not attempt to contact or reach any colony settlements, and do not engage unless attacked.”

We’re cruising at high altitude, far above the weather, and the XO is broadcasting the same message every few minutes. We have received a few replies from our people stranded below, but the XO has denied all requests for pickups, much to my relief. I don’t want to leave our people stranded, of course, but they’d be no better off in the hold of the drop ship than they are near their escape pods on the ground, and I don’t want to go back into the mess below and discover more bad news. In any case, our remaining fuel is barely enough to get us safely back to the terraforming station where we left the rest of our crew.

“Talk about a one-sided ass-kicking,” Halley says to me while the XO keeps himself busy with the ship’s radio suite back in the crew chief’s seat. “Our ship’s gone, our colony’s wiped out, and now they’re just setting up shop down there.”

“I don’t think they even tried to kick our asses,” I say, and shudder at the fresh memory of hundreds of colonists lying dead in the streets of the main settlement, with no apparent injuries, or damage to the buildings. “That place back there wasn’t wiped out. Just fumigated. Like you’d smoke out a bunch of ants in your kitchen cabinet, you know? Toss in a pest stick, come back to mop up the dead stuff later.”

“That’s a cheery thought,” she says. “Like we don’t even rate real weapons.”

To our left, the local sun, Capella A, is just about to touch the horizon. The sun looks bigger and more washed out than our sun back on Earth, but the display is still spectacular, like a hydrogen bomb going off in the distance. The sky on the horizon is a brilliant palette of orange, red, and dark purple. I watch my first extrasolar sunset for a while, and it occurs to me that I can’t remember ever having sat down just to watch a sunset back on Earth.

“Well,” Halley says. “I do hope the Navy’s going to send something bigger than an old frigate to check on us, or there’ll be a bunch more crash pods raining down soon.”

The night on Capella Ac is black as pitch. There’s no local moon overhead to serve as a planetary night light. As soon as the last sliver of the local sun sinks below the horizon, the world outside disappears. I can’t even make out the ragged line of the horizon ahead of us anymore, and the lack of external visual references makes me disoriented.

“Put your visor down, and tap the switch on the brow ridge,” Halley tells me when I voice my discomfort. “You got infrared and low light magnification built into that brain bucket there.”

As we slowly cross the mountain range, the engines of our ship laboring to keep a few thousand feet between us and the highest peaks, Halley tries to contact the terraforming station that still lies a few hundred miles to our north.

“Terraformer Willoughby Four-Seven, this is Stinger Six-Two. Do you read, over?”

I expect another long period of silence in my headset, but the reply from the station comes almost instantly.

“Stinger Six-Two, I read you. Glad to see you back.”

“Four-Seven, we are two-niner-zero miles south of you, inbound to land. What’s the weather like down there?”

“Lousy,” the reply comes. “Heavy rain, visibility less than a quarter mile, winds at three-zero knots from bearing one-eighty. You sure you want to try landing your bird in this mess?”

“We have nowhere else to go,” Halley replies. I have thirty minutes of fuel left. It’s either that, or putting down in the sticks. Just turn on all the lights for me down there. I’ll find the complex with ground radar, and do the last bit by sight.”

“Copy that, Six-Two. We’ll keep the lights on for you. Good luck, and be careful.”

Halley looks at me, and chuckles.

“’Be careful’? We’re in an unarmed ship, low on gas, on a planet crawling with giant things that aren’t friendly, and about to make a landing in the soup with no AILS, and he tells me to ‘be careful’.”

“I’m having second thoughts about this Navy career,” I tell Halley. “We make it off this rock, I’ll put in for office duty, or laundry folding. Something low-stress on a quiet space station somewhere.”

“Fat chance, son,” the XO says from behind our seats. I’m so tired that I didn’t hear him coming through the cockpit door.

“Hate to break it to you, but we just bumped into the first alien species ever encountered by humanity. We make it off this rock, you’ll be one of the most popular guys in the entire fleet. Once the Intel guys are done with us, that is.”