Jason Halstead - Screamer

“ You’re locked in Gunny, rapid deployment in five…four…three…two… Go!”

Gunnery Sergeant Elsadora Quinn tightened every muscle in her body as though it would make a difference. The explosive force of her deployment pod being released from the orbital ship was enough to knock a regular untrained human out. Elsa was anything but that.

The deployment pod, or screamer as the Marines affectionately called it, slipped through the vacuum of space alongside the other nineteen dark silver pods. It wasn’t until they breached the upper atmosphere that the heat resistant nose began to glow. To those on the planet below looking up it would seem nothing more than a group of shooting stars. Perfectly normal save for the concentration of twenty of them in a single area.

With the acceleration out of the ship’s deployment tubes completed, Elsa had recovered enough to begin to relax. Just in time, her pod started to vibrate around her as the planet’s atmosphere began to slow her descent. The low grade inertial arrester built into the pod kept the vibration to a dull buzz. It made the hair stand up on her arms but was nothing compared to what a low cost personal entertainment device could provide for entertainment during the lonely hours on a deep space cruise.

Elsa studied the holographic display on outwardly mirrored viewport in her helmet. Her rate of descent was falling. A few more seconds and she’d reach terminal velocity, at which point the screamer’s fins would deploy and its thrusters would fire. From experience she knew that was when things started to get interesting.

With the wings deployed a screamer had just enough of a signature to present a target. The odds of getting hit by any manmade weaponry were less than one in a hundred, but she’d seen it happen. It took a direct hit from a serious weapon to take one out — they were designed to deliver their payload all the way to a hard landing at speeds in excess of six hundred miles an hour, with the payload expected to survive the impact. What happened more often was aerial burst weaponry that would knock a screamer off course.

Elsa felt the sudden jolt of the thrusters engaging, propelling her pod back upwards into speeds going well past a thousand miles an hour. Another readout on the display indicated thirteen minutes until impact. It was always like that, somewhere between ten and twenty minutes, depending on the size of the planet and how thick the atmosphere was. The longest ten to twenty minutes of her life. She hated the feeling, being trapped in the cocoon with nothing but the smells of her own nervous sweat mixed with the resilient foam she was encased in.

“ So this is how an egg feels,” she muttered aloud. She’d never seen a real egg, but she’d recently read about them while trying to pass the time on the journey to Vitalis. The planet was outside the edge of controlled space, five light years beyond the closest jumpstation. That meant hibernation cycles for the crew and marines. Nine months in, 3 months out. Only way to keep the body from falling apart. Seven years of that, even though it only felt like a little less than two, left a person with a lot of time to kill.

So she’d read up on Vitalis in her spare time, pulling everything the ship’s library could tell her. Humanity had been colonizing other worlds for close to one hundred and fifty years but terraforming had not been a practical or sustainable as promised. Mars had enough of an atmosphere to be comparable to living several thousand feet above sea level on Earth, but even Earth’s sister planet was lacking in nutrients and necessary minerals to support agriculture. With time and research resilient strains had been engineered, but the dreams of unlimited farmlands feeding the starving throngs of humanity had fallen short. And that was Mars, the planet that resembled Earth the closest.

Vitalis offered to change all of that, according to the preliminary data she’d seen. The planet not only supported human life, but the research conducted showed it supported super-human life. Data from the researchers that had been sent to the planet showed amazing preliminary results. It was as if the planet was a fountain of youth. That, in turn, made it a suddenly very valuable resource. All the more so since the beacon that notified the Terran Coalition of its existence had no one alive that claimed it, making it an open planet.

Her unit had been dispatched to the planet to offer support to the advanced research team onboard the Terran Coalition Ship Explorer. By the time Elsa’s frigate had left the Explorer was already a year enroute. They knew of the reported two crashed vessels, one a registered transport and the second an unregistered vessel that had launched a salvage beacon in orbit around the planet. When the research team arrived no survivors had been reported, making the salvage claim pointless.

A research station was established and the TCS Explorer was standing by orbit for support. The research settlement had been destroyed by an unknown force and within days the entire crew of the Explorer had died. The lack of further communications had changed the Marine vessel’s mission. When they arrived in system reconnaissance of the Explorer returned preliminary results of the entire crew dying of malnutrition. The larders and galleys had been full, confusing and complicating the issue.

A beep sounded, drawing her out of her reverie. Impact was less than two minutes away. She took a few deep breaths, ignoring how the unfiltered air tasted on her tongue. With ninety seconds remaining she saw the flashing warning of a proximity alert and felt the screamer jerk to the left. She stared at the screen, her fingers trying to push dents in the armor that covered her chest. Her breath whistled quicker as the seconds ticked off on the display. Being knocked off course was always a threat, but seldom a reality. When it happened it was always somebody else, never her.

With five seconds to spare the screamer exploded. She felt like she’d left her heart behind as the armored pod disintegrated around her. It took the last of the inertial arresting with it, leaving her in horrible motion that twisted her stomach into knots. The capsule slammed into the ground, sliding and rolling in the path made by the hardened nosecone of the deployment pod.

Elsa spat out some blood from where she’d bitten her lip. Mouth free, she croaked out the command to open the capsule. The forceful ejection sent it flying straight out and into the wall of the furrow a few feet away. So much for the instructors promise that the pods landed right side up every time.

With the top portion gone, a fine mist covered her. Elsa fought to hold her breath but the smell of rancid peaches still assaulted her. The foam holding her in place dissolved rapidly, letting her slide out within seconds. She scrambled around the pod, keeping contact with it to retain some semblance of up and down until her body could compensate for the trauma she’d gone through. She triggered the release on the cargo bay and pulled the door off so it served as protection to her back. A few more twists and pressed buttons released first her X109 energy rifle then the large container of supplies that she slipped on her back.

Elsa spun around, rifle held at the ready, and surveyed her situation for the first time. The ditch dug by the screamer was roughly three feet deep. Giant trees and vegetation rose around her, enclosing her within the tropical jungle her pod had landed in. She frowned, the insertion point was supposed to be near the destroyed research outpost, humanity’s only real settlements on Vitalis. Whatever had hit her pod had redirected her.